Vancouver: The Canada Feature Film Fund will undergo an overhaul in its sophomore year now that Telefilm Canada has accepted a handful of recommendations from a 24-member advisory group. But the details will have to wait until the new guidelines are announced early this year.

CanLit is white hot. Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave in Tora Bora or cryogenically frozen for the last decade, that should come as no surprise.

Camelia Frieberg is the Genie Award-winning producer of The Five Senses, The Sweet Hereafter, Eclipse, Exotica and Masala.

As Canadian distribution companies prepare to release a slew of new films at your local multiplex, the challenge to raise Canadian films’ presence on our screens from its current paltry 2% to 3% ensues.

A couple of years ago some industry pundits forecast digital cinema would by now have rolled over traditional 35mm film projection. However, worldwide, there are currently only 35 true D-cinema auditoriums – theatres that digitally project movies stored on a hard drive, offering image quality that meets audience expectation.

Montreal: Guideline changes are underway for the second year of operations for the $100-million Canada Feature Film Fund that could have a significant impact on the coveted performance-based envelopes. Telefilm Canada says it has recommended holding the envelopes at 50% for 2002/03, and raising it to 60% in 2003/04.
A joint Telefilm-CFFF advisory group committee will review the issue at a meeting in February, says Johanne St-Arnauld, Telefilm director, international relations. Both the CFTPA and APFTQ producer associations are also recommending holding the performance component at 50%, although individual advisory group members believe the share should grow if the 5% box-office target – the CFFF’s key policy goal – is to be achieved. In distribution, the performance component in 2001/02 was 85%.
Another major change in the works is a recommendation to give broadcast-affiliate producers access to a maximum of one-third of the CFFF’s performance (production only) envelope. The performance component now includes an expanded list of qualifying production companies, and Telefilm says a producer’s recoupment record will be integrated into the performance calculation in the future.

Montreal: With European coproduction taking on a broader EU profile and producers and distributors looking for more commercially viable product, the market is ripe for Canada to make a concerted effort in Europe, both in terms of public agencies and producers. That was the key message to come out of Immersion 2001: Europe, a five-day feature film networking event held in Paris in late November, and by all accounts the most successful of the Immersion programs organized by Telefilm Canada in the past seven years.
In 2001, Telefilm certified 98 international film and TV coproduction projects with combined budgets of $668.2 million, about 15% less in dollar terms than the 98 projects worth $778.9 million coproduced in 2000. The Canadian share of financing in 2001 is $383.5 million, or 57%, while spending stands at $339.2 million, or 51%.

Snakes, mud and natural disasters best describe the conditions endured throughout the production of 100 Days in the Jungle, a very ambitious MOW for CTV coproduced by Edmonton’s ImagiNation Productions and Vancouver’s Sextant Entertainment Group.

On a recent trip to Los Angles, Rob Guenette, the newly appointed president and chief executive officer of Toronto-based Wolf Group, was struck by the vibrancy and range of advertising in every corner of the city. It got him thinking about the supposed death of traditional media, which at the centre of the media universe appeared to be alive and well.
‘I thought, wait a minute, why is everybody predicting the death of 30-second TV? Other than the hype and a lot of talk – rhetoric in come cases – I don’t see where 30-second TV is dying.’
Indeed, while the advent of new technologies, particularly the personal video recorder, has spurred some to declare traditional commercial spots all but dead, there is growing and strong opinion that, in fact, the opposite will occur: that the PVR could turn out to be a boon to commercial production.
Central to this logic is the notion that PVRs such as one offered by Bell ExpressVu in Canada will attract significantly greater numbers of viewers to television as a whole.

Although 2001 was largely unspectacular in the commercial production industry, with cutbacks to advertising budgets and general slowness, it certainly appeared to be a plum time for spot shops to do a little recruiting abroad.

James Weyman is acting director of Skills Development and Marketing Initiatives at the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

With little in the way of industry news unfolding over the holidays while our broadcasting execs, producers et al were vacationing south of the border, despite the poor exchange rate, I’m still thinking about the anti-runaway production issue that inspired at least one U.S. campaigner to make a public parallel between Canada and Osama Bin Laden. The anti-Canada campaign, fully equipped with party-line rhetoric and statistics, couldn’t seem more inappropriately timed, but then propaganda seems to serve its perpetrators best in moments of strife.