How Telefilm can make movies, not just deals by Kate Taylor
Source : Globe & Mail
December 10, 2005
Like thousands of other Canadians, I went to see Water this week, drinking in the film's exotic images of the subcontinent and its romantic story about the fate of a community of widows on the eve of Indian independence. This film by Toronto's Deepa Mehta is Telefilm Canada's current poster child for the potential of the English-Canadian movie industry: With rave reviews from its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, a carefully timed commercial release last month and a well-orchestrated marketing campaign, Water has already earned more than $1-million at the box office and is expected to top $2-million. That makes it one of those rare English-Canadian films, still in theatres more than a month after its release, that may actually earn back the money -- $2.6-million in this case -- that the federal film agency has invested in it. It was also, by the way, shot in Sri Lanka and stars South Asian actors who speak almost all its dialogue in Hindi.
Making a successful Canadian film is tough; hey, defining a successful Canadian film is tough, so, no wonder it took Parliament's standing committee on Canadian Heritage 249 pages to come up with some suggestions for a new feature-film policy contained in a recently released report. Some of these recommendations are obvious: The committee suggests that DVD rentals and television broadcasts, not just the box-office dollars earned from theatrical release, be included when calculating the audiences that Canadian films are reaching, and wants the CBC to show more Canadian film. And some of them are charmingly naive: In the absence of either federal political will or constitutional authority to legislate on this issue, the committee simply challenges exhibitors to double the amount of screen time allotted to Canadian features.
Many of the recommendations, however, are solid proposals that should deliver more successes, whether they are an internationally minded film like Water or a more nationally motivated one like C.R.A.Z.Y., the Quebec coming-of-age piece set during the Quiet Revolution that is currently crossing over into the English market.
The committee chose to weigh in on this topic because of the perception that the current policy is not working: that was the infamous target of five per cent of Canadian box office for Canadian films, established by the Department of Canadian Heritage in 2000 under then minister Sheila Copps. Actually the 2000 policy is working just fine -- Canadian films have the target in their sights -- it's just not working in a way that is politically acceptable. The boffo numbers are all from Quebec and while English-Canadian film has grown exponentially during those years it is still only earning about 1.5 per cent of the box office, a number that may represent a real achievement in the marketplace but remains politically embarrassing.
The committee's idea is not merely to recognize the differences between the two markets, but actually to codify them, setting up separate targets, one for Quebec and one for the rest of Canada. That will be tricky -- how do you divide the budget between a French arm that is investing in a mature cultural industry and an English arm that is trying to start one? -- but it should allow the English side to concentrate on what is realistic and what's not.
Quebec's distinct culture can produce populist genre films that speak to mass audiences, movies such as the Les Boys series and Florida. On the other hand, whatever the success of English Canada's attempts to do the same (Men with Brooms, the heist movie Foolproof, the out-of-the-closet comedy Mambo Italiano), they can never compete with Hollywood product. Is Telefilm an investment banker lending money to genuinely marketable strategies -- in which case it's a decidedly unsuccessful one since it rarely recoups its capital -- or is it a cultural agency giving grants to artists, in which case a film's box-office potential would come second to its creative credentials? The question is an important one because no Canadian feature headed for theatrical release can ever get made without Telefilm's money.
Cutting into the heart of this dilemma, the committee recommends that Telefilm start using peer juries, which is the way arts bodies like the Canada Council award grants. Meanwhile, the agency's executive director Wayne Clarkson is floating the idea of creating powerful individual officers -- sort of super-curators or artistic producers -- to make the picks. Both suggestions are a response to complaints in the industry that nobody can be held accountable for Telefilm's anonymous decisions. Certainly, either peer juries or film czars would be an improvement on the current situation where faceless bureaucrats -- and I call them that in the nicest possible way -- dictate the nature of Canadian cinema.
The committee noted that all the witnesses who appeared before it argued for quality over quantity, and making the decisions more transparent would help achieve that because it would force individuals to defend the choices. At Telefilm, just talking about the content of film rather than box-office targets would put the horse back in front of the cart.
