Istvan Szabo will open the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival with his latest picture Being Julia, a 1930s period piece about sex and lies in the stage world, starring Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons.

While many Canadian producers struggle to find funds to make homegrown television, broadcasters are reaping record gains.

Banff, AB: By the time they rolled the credits, the 2004 Banff Television Festival had played out much like it has any other year – a little less pizzazz, sure, and fewer people, true again – but otherwise a productive four days away from the office according to attendees, many of whom, ironically, were pleased with this year’s diminished crowds, noting that it was easier to arrange meetings with ‘the right people’ at the retooled fest, and that the 25th Banff has regained some of the close, casual atmosphere for which it was once famous. More signal, less noise.

?dprophesies about the ascendancy of cable, this year’s upfronts were still mainly a seesaw battle between CTV and Global. Five years ago it was Global’s game, but today, CTV holds the majority of the top-10 and top-20 program slots in most regions.

* Raynald Briere has stepped down as president and CEO of TVA Group, citing health problems, and will be temporarily replaced by Serge Gouin, head of parent outfit Quebecor Media, until a replacement is named.

Corporation opens strong stateside

PETER Vamos’ editorial in the June 7, 2004 edition of Playback (‘Why seven production centers?’) seeds the notion that the creation of a broad and diverse national production sector is clearly undermining the entire national infrastructure now that production has slowed. He suggests that Canada’s film and television industry should be returned to its ‘traditional production centers’ in Vancouver and Toronto since the relative decline of production in those regions, their lack of competitive tax-credit and equity programs, and Canadian and foreign producers electing to film their projects in other provinces have placed these regions under threat.

If progressive cultural policy is good business for the tens of thousands of producers, actors, writers, directors and crew who have en masse been contemplating alternative vocations these past few years while production has staggered, then they must all be cheering the results of the June 28 federal election.

A glitzy, glamorous Oscars-style film awards show in Canada, celebrating the best in domestic movie talent on primetime TV? Even today, the notion rails against the ingrained humility and inferiority complex that lurks inside most Canadians. Twenty-five years ago, it seemed like a wildly overambitious pipe dream.

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Maria Topalovich is president and CEO of the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television.

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