Take One's annual survey of Canadian features released in the GTA

TAKE ONE, Spring, 2001 by Wyndham Wise

For the past five years Take One, in our winter issue, has published a survey of Canadian features that played in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), logging them according to the number of weeks the film played and number of screens they played on. The final result for 2000 is as follows: 34 Canadian features played on a total of 568 screens. For the purposes of this survey 568 screens (249 Cineplex, 206 Famous Players, 98 AMC, 15 independent) were tracked over 52 weeks for a total of 29,536 screens. Screen time for Canadian films in the GTA in 2000 was 1.9 per cent.

In terms of weeks played, the top five Canadian films in the GTA in 2000 were Allan Moyle's New Waterford Girl (18), Istvan Szabo's Sunshine (16), Robert Vince's MVP: Most Valuable Primate (16), Christian Duguay's The Art of War (12) and Stewart Raffill's Grizzly Falls (7). Honourable mention goes to Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey (which was a 1999 release, but still played seven weeks in 2000), Gary Burns's waydowntown (6), Ron Mann's Grass (4), Denys Arcand's Stardom (4), Jeremy Podeswa's The Five Senses (3), Louis Belanger's Post Mortem (3), Reginald Harkema's A Girl Is a Girl (3) and Denis Villeneuve's Maelstrom (3). Two thousand was not a vintage year but healthy in terms of the growth of a commercial Canadian cinema. Three of the top five were genre films. Take One's choice for best Canadian feature of 2000 is, without a doubt, New Waterford Girl, and all those Academy jury members who didn't nominate Tricia Fish for one of the most original and insightful coming-of-age screenplays ever written in Canada should be taken out to the back shed and given forty whacks.

Take One has decided to suspend its annual survey for now. The point has been made, and the results are too depressing to repeat year after year. It's becoming a bad-news story. The percentage of Canadian screen time in the GTA has not risen above 2.4 per cent and hit a low of 1.45 per cent over the period Take One has been doing its tracking. When Heritage Minister Sheila Copps announced additional federal funding for feature filmmaking at last year's Vancouver International Film Festival, she got it right when she acknowledged that Canadian films occupied two per cent of national screen time and expressed a hope that it would be five per cent in the foreseeable future. With all due respect to the minister, five per cent is probably unattainable but three per cent might be achievable over the next generation if the quality of Canadian feature-filmmaking talent continues to improve. It was in 1924 when the provincial treasurer of Ontario declared upon the opening of the Trenton Studios that not one per cent of the films in Canadian cinemas were actually Canadian. It's taken over 75 years to reach 1.9 per cent.

Instead of just a survey of the 34 features that played in the GTA in 2000, Take One thought it might be interesting to chart the 200 plus films released between 1994 and 2000, focusing on the 20 that played 10 or more weeks. Nearly a third (six) were co-productions: Francois Girard's The Red Violin (Canada / Italy / U.S. / U.K.), Istvan Szabo's Sunshine (Canada / Germany / Hungary), Mort Ransen's Margaret's Museum (Canada/U.K.), Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey (Canada/U.K.), Robert Lepage's Le Confessional (Canada/France/U.K.) and Charles Martin Smith's Air Bud (Canada/U.S.). No longer are international co-productions dismissed as "unCanadian," but they have been embraced as the way of the future. Notable by their absence are directors coming from a documentary tradition. Only Mort Ransen, Sturla Gunnarsson and Anne Wheeler can be said to represent that background. The dominant directors are now from a new generation whose resumes do not include the National Film Board or the CBC. Francois Girard, Robert Lepage, Atom Egoyan, Don McKellar, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Patricia Rozema are new leaders of a more dynamic Canadian feature-film culture.

The lack of Quebecois films in the first 20 is notable; a weakness of any Toronto-centric survey. The story of Quebec cinema could be told from a similar survey of Montreal releases but it would be a radically different tale. The cinematic divide can be demonstrated quite simply by the two most successful Quebecois films of the past six years; Louis Saia's Les Boys and Les Boys II played, collectively, three weeks in the GTA. An encouraging trend is the growth of genre films that do well in the North American market as a whole, such as the Air Bud franchise from Vancouver (which includes Robert Vince's MVP: Most Valuable Primate) and Christian Duguay's The Art of War. It is perhaps ironic that the last director's name to appear in the alphabetical listing of the first 20 films is Patricia Rozema for her lesbian love story, When Night Is Falling. While there's nothing ironic about the popularity of When Night Is Falling, it's Mansfield Park, Rozema's other film made during this period, that is not on the list. Here's the irony: if there had been any Canadian money in the film, it would rival or surpass The Red Violin and Exotica for top spot.