Business on the beach: the Canada Pavilion, Richard Stursberg and the new paradigm

TAKE ONE, Sept-Dec, 2003 by Maurie Alioff

Managed by Telefilm Canada, the Canada Pavilion at this year's Cannes was located in the festival's International Village, a strip of tentlike structures between the Croisette and the beach. Neighbours with Switzerland, Germany and close to Quebec's entirely separate pavilion, Canada had a choice position facing the market's seaside entrance, just moments from the Palais. The installation--designed to focus international attention on Canadian movies, help seek foreign partners, set up meetings, offer information and so on--hosted 28 registered companies, including production companies that used it as a base of operations and a contact point.

The pavilion's red and white, rustic-looking interior offered a reception and information desk, a main area furnished with directors's chairs and computer terminals with Internet access. Naturally, the beach deck was a bonanza during a festival favoured by 10 days of crystalline blue skies--a convivial environment for talking co-productions, doing press, schmoozing or even chilling for a while before heading back into the fray. In its second year at the festival, the Canada Pavilion was developed and fine-tuned by two energetic women: Sheila de la Varende, head of Telefilm's European office and its director of International Development and Promotion, and Lise Corriveau, manager of Festivals and Markets. De la Varende told me that before the 2002 festival, the agency had a booth in the Riviera (the complex that houses the market), and then a hotel office. After setting up partnerships with provincial agencies and certain federal government departments, it became feasible for Telefilm to secure space that opened up in the International Village and build a more sophisticated operation.

This year, the pavilion's special events included networking breakfasts with France and Australia; the launch of Immersion Europe: 2003, a four-day co-production forum organized by de la Varende and slated for Paris in November; a discussion session with directors Jean-Francois Pouliot (La Grande seduction) and Bernard Emond (20 h 17, rue Darling); and a press conference called by the NFB to talk up the new World Documentary Fund it's backing with the U.K. Film Council and the BBC. Two major schmoozes celebrating Canadian moviemakers at the festival, a cocktail party and a packed gathering Telefilm called the "Canadian Bash" took place elsewhere on the Croisette.

One afternoon on the Croisette, as I plowed through festival types on cellphones and local kids on rollerblades, loudspeakers piped out a medley of Henry Mancini soundtrack music. Touch of Evil segued into "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's, evoking screen images that ranged from Orson Welles's nightmare of corruption to Holly Golightly's candy-coloured Manhattan. On my way to interview Richard Stursberg, Telefilm's executive director, I flashed on the notion that the versatility suggested by Mancini's oeuvre was a pretty good metaphor for at least one of the policy goals being advocated by Telefilm: a greater variety of film projects.

When I talked to Stursberg in the courtyard of his relatively modest hotel, he made it clear he was having a better time at Cannes than he did in 2002. "Last year," he recalled in a style that is urbane and peppered with irony, "we had established new investment and new distribution rules that seemed to catch some of the producers a little off guard. When I arrived, we had to have some virile conversations. I had been on the job for about four months at that point, so there was a lot of talking to do with a lot of people." At this year's festival, Stursberg focused more on discussing issues such as co-productions with potential foreign partners, Canadians, and "international financiers of one variety or another. Everyone is here."

The policy behind the new Telefilm rules was already in place when Stursberg joined the agency but few in the industry, he says, took it seriously. Basically, when Telefilm invests more than a million dollars of taxpayers' money in a film, "we want to know that there's some reasonable chance it makes a million dollars at the box office, which is not a lot," he said. Naturally, the only way get more bums in seats and eventually hit the stated target of five per cent of the domestic box office, is for Telefilm to invest in a more varied and accessible slate of films.

As producers backed by Telefilm try to find ways to reach their target audience, distributors have been asked to commit themselves more fully to projects they believe in. Telefilm wants them to "step-up with a guarantee at the back end to spend money for prints and promotion." These are reasonable requests, as Stursberg genially points out, but when he first raised the issue, some filmmakers thought he was asking them to walk on water. "It took people a while to get their heads around the new arrangement," he said, "and I understand completely. They had certain kinds of projects in development that no longer reflected the kind of direction we were going in." But a lot has changed in a year. "My impression is that people are reasonably comfortable with where we're going now and are moving forward to it."