There are two things Guy Bennett is not worried about.

Call Perfect Pie Barbara Willis Sweete’s debut and the director and partner at Toronto’s Rhombus Media just laughs.

19 Months, a first-time feature from Randall Cole to bow at the Vancouver International Film Festival, is not about falling in love, as with most romantic comedies, but attempting to fall out of love with dignity.

Vancouver: For a bunch of people whose business is capturing fact and fantasy for the flickering screen, members of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C. have no illusions about the challenges of the Vancouver industry over the short and long term.

Vancouver: Thinking big is one of those strangely perilous situations in Canadian production financing: Forget your Canuck roots and the found money from public sources, and Telefilm Canada et al gets a bit cranky. Try to capture a commercial appeal and the high-minded Canadian festivals tend to hold their noses. Fantasizing about conquering the U.S. box office is great and all, but remember, the real goal is showing Canada to Canadians.

Vancouver: The film and television production sector in Vancouver may be valued at $1.1 billion, but the real economic impact comes in the spin-off business to suppliers on the periphery of the hubbub.

If there has been one major development in the professional relationship between director Atom Egoyan and director of photography Paul Sarossy since their last picture, Felicia’s Journey (1999), it’s the launch of Sarossy’s own helming career. The Toronto-based cinematographer directed last year’s Mr. In-Between, a U.K.-produced drama about a killer-for-hire that struck audiences with its downbeat tone. So how does this experience alter the filmmakers’ on-set dynamic, starting with their latest, Ararat?

Montreal: Shooting is underway on Mental (working title), a comedy for the nine- to 12-year-old international tween market. The series is production house Zone3’s first English-language drama.
Producer Patricia Lavoie (Lassie, Wimzie’s House) and creators/showrunners/supervising producers Leila Basen (The Neverending Story) and David Preston (Emily of New Moon) are shooting 13 half-hours over 52 days through to late November on location in suburban Chambly. The show follows the adventures of Donovan, a young teen who has four really cool characters lodged in his head.

Show me a reporter who doesn’t envy documentary filmmakers Peter Raymont and Lindalee Tracey and I’ll show you someone not worthy of his press tag, typewriter and hip flask. The White Pine Pictures (A Scattering of Seeds) partners have such strong connections inside the RCMP, CSIS and Immigration Canada that, even as law and customs officials fought back chaos and blind panic last fall, their camera crews were allowed into some very restricted areas to shoot The Undefended Border.
‘It’s a real coup in terms of access,’ says Raymont. ‘They know us and they trust us – enough to let us in anyway.’
The three-hour, three-part doc about the hidden ‘cat and mouse, cloak and dagger’ world of border security airs Sept. 25, Oct. 2 and Oct. 9 on TVOntario, Access Alberta, Knowledge Network and SCN, just as three other White Pine projects get rolling.

Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter has been voted the best Canadian movie of all time in an online poll of Playback readers.
The 1997 adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel about a tragic school bus crash and its impact on a small town, The Sweet Hereafter, produced by Egoyan and Camelia Frieberg, garnered Academy Award nominations for Egoyan for best direction and adapted screenplay. While the film did very respectable business in Canada, its critical acclaim south of the border translated into only about US$4.3 million in ticket sales, due likely to the film’s uncompromising subject matter.
The Sweet Hereafter’s major category Oscar noms, unprecedented and yet to be repeated for a Canadian production, were largely thanks to an aggressive promotional push by distributors Alliance Communications (now part of Alliance Atlantis) and Fine Line Features.

If Canadian films don’t start to pick up their share of the Canadian box office within the next few years, Robert Lantos, for one, says it’s time to throw in the towel on public funding.
Canada’s biggest and inarguably most successful film producer says he has no reason to believe Canadian films can’t break or at least take 5% of the market share, as set out in the $100-million Canada Feature Film Fund. But, he adds, if they don’t achieve this ‘modest’ goal within the next five years or so, there’s little reason for the Canadian government to continue creating this artificial economy that has, over the past decade, contributed to the decline of quality Canadian moviemaking.
‘It’s a do-or-die time for those involved in making Canadian films,’ he says, pointing to the need for distributors and producers to take on a significantly bigger risk-taking role in the filmmaking, financing and marketing process. ‘I can’t think of any national cinema that doesn’t have at least a 5% share of its domestic box office.’

It has been said that everyone wants something for nothing, and nowhere is that more true than at a film festival. As buyers from home and abroad descend on the Toronto International Film Festival this week, many are reporting that, because of the increasingly harsh and unpredictable world market, they are shopping for increasingly obscure films by increasingly raw directors – hoping to luck out and buy the next breakaway hit-to-be, like Y Tu Mama Tambien or Monsoon Wedding, for a song.
‘As each year passes, there is pressure to be even more selective than the year before,’ says Troy Lum, one of two buyers flying in from Hopscotch Films in Australia, ‘whilst at the same time having to make faster acquisition decisions.’
Hopscotch is shopping for titles that straddle the art house/commercial fence and has already snapped up five TIFF films, including Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Black and White by Aussie Craig Lahiff. But U.S. majors are making life difficult for the upstart boutique, Lum says, by buying more than the usual number of niche films.

The 27th Toronto International Film Festival unspools Sept. 5-14 with a contingent of highly anticipated Canadian films, new screening programs, a return of red carpet glamour and remembrances of 9/11, which ground last year’s events to a halt.

The Rogers Industry Centre has prepared a series of sessions for TIFF 2002 that address issues of creative autonomy, the marketing and distribution of films, as well as evolving technologies and their potential impact. This year’s offerings, open to registered industry members only, reflect the global face of cinema and acknowledge the growing stature of the independent filmmaker.

Montreal: A new CFTPA-commissioned study on Canadian film and television production reveals content production financed without Canadian Television Fund support represents one of the strongest developing sectors in the industry. As a percentage of all Canadian-content production, non-CTF-supported production has increased from about 60% to 71% over the past five years. The study also underlines the vital role non-CTF-supported production has in attracting international investment.
‘The Economic Impact of Non-CTF Certified Canadian Film and Television Production,’ prepared for the CFTPA by PricewaterhouseCoopers, says non-CTF-supported content production accounted for $1.6 billion, or 71%, of the $2.3 billion in Canadian-content production in 2000/01. During the same five-year period, the volume of annual CTF-supported production has essentially remained stable, between $600 million and $700 million – $683 million last year, says the report.