Vancouver: It’s not meant to be a horror show, but the annual federal production funding results seem for many producers to be getting scarier each year – with the ultimate fright that that money may vanish altogether.
Take for instance the recent 2002 Equity Investment Program results from Telefilm Canada – disappointing more producers this year despite a $20-million bonus shifted from the Canadian Television Fund’s Licence Fee Program. While many fledgling or unproven proposals won’t get EIP or LFP this time, programs that had made the cut in years past – Paradise Falls (Breakthrough) or Jinnah On Crime (Force Four), for example – are also out of luck today.

Content producers and rights holders may have cause for celebration as a loophole in the Copyright Act that has given way to the likes of iCraveTV and JumpTV may soon be closed.
Bill C-48, an act to amend section 31 of the Copyright Act, had its third reading in the House of Commons on June 18 and was passed unanimously, although is still to be approved by the Senate. Section 31 pertains to the compulsory licence that allows retransmission of copyrighted works without permission from copyright holders through royalties set by the Copyright Board.

Montreal: Questioning recent directives and growing performance demands, the country’s principal distributors association is distancing itself from Canada Feature Film Fund policies and the fund’s primary goal of reaching 5% national market share for domestic movies by 2005.

Credo closes its doors

You turn on American TV and there seems to be little worth watching. You turn on Canadian TV and there seems to be little worth watching. While the reasons are quite different, the results often have a similar quality: non-compelling and unoriginal programming.

In Playback’s May 27 CBC tribute, Rae Hull was credited as executive producer of ZeD. Hull is, in fact, the executive in charge of production for ZeD, while McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves is ZeD’s exec producer.

Banff, AB: Citing a need for ‘greater fairness, transparency and consistency,’ Telefilm Canada’s executive director Richard Stursberg announced a series of measures at Banff2002 aimed at improving his organization’s decision-making processes and overall performance.

* Music industry executive Richard Camilleri has been appointed CanWest Global Communications’ new chief operating officer responsible for the integration of TV, radio, print, advertising and interactive operations. He is former president of Sony Music Entertainment (Canada) and more recently was chairman and CEO of Arius3D, a 3D imaging company.

CTF shuffles management

Montreal: Apart from some kind of required correlation to the arts, Bravo!FACT is arguably the most wide open of the national production funding programs. The foundation provides grants of up to $25,000 to established directors seeking creative relief as well as to emerging talents looking for a start.

Montreal: Cinemaginaire, one of the country’s most consistently successful feature film production companies, is in various stages of preproduction on new films by Denys Arcand and Emile Gaudreault and its first-ever episodic TV drama.
Producer Denise Robert says Arcand’s Les Invasions barbares is a revisiting, not a sequel, more than two decades later of the lives of Le Declin de l’empire amercain’s (1986) smart, middle-class Quebecois characters, portrayed by Dorothee Berryman, Dominique Michel, Louise Portal, Pierre Curzi, Yves Jacques and Remy Girard. Declin cinematographer Guy Dufaux is shooting Invasions.
The film is the renowned director’s first original script in French since Jesus de Montreal (1989). Arcand cowrote Stardom (2000) and was essentially a director for hire on Joyeux Calvaire (1996) and Love and Human Remains (1993).

True to its strategy of following a year or two of development with a period of intense shooting, Toronto prodco Rhombus Media is underway or soon to embark on a diverse slate of new projects.
An Idea of Canada is the working title for a one-hour doc, produced by Rhombus partner Niv Fichman and Jody Shapiro, that follows Governor General Adrienne Clarkson on regional visits across Canada. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of Canadian citizens being appointed to the governor general post previously occupied by British appointees. The doc focuses on Clarkson’s stops in smaller communities on Canadian coasts, and so far the crew has shot in the Arctic, yielding 30 hours of footage, in St. John’s and along the Labrador coast, and it will soon head off to B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands.