Source : Globe & Mail

Jacques Bensimon has some advice for his National Film Board successor: Master the art of debate

The headhunters have been hunting, the selection committee selecting. Now all that's needed is for the Heritage Department to hurry up and pick a new commissioner for the National Film Board of Canada, a plum position at a cultural body respected the world over.

Of course there's a catch, and it's a big one.

The candidate who succeeds Jacques Bensimon, who just completed his five-year term, will have to take on the Sisyphean task of explaining time and time again to Ottawa what exactly the NFB does.

Bensimon believes his replacement should be named within a month. In a recent interview, the day after his term officially ended, he wouldn't comment on the selection process, nor would Heritage. But TVOntario's former creative head of network programming, Rudy Buttignol, is said to be a candidate, and the NFB's director-general of its English program branch, Tom Perlmutter, is another name bandied around by NFB watchers. The organization's director of business affairs, Claude Joli-Coeur, has been named acting commissioner.

Some observers candidly say that Heritage has been dragging its feet. But Bensimon, who is on the selection committee, said that "in comparison to other agencies, we are faring very well" in getting the department's attention.

Yet he knows the political side all too well. His biggest frustration, he says, was not to have strengthened the government's $66-million base commitment to the NFB's budget, although he noted that during his term, he had been able to add an extra $10-million from other government departments, as well as from co-productions with other film bodies and from the sales and presales of NFB films.

Still, "the unfortunate thing is that during five years, I've known four [Heritage] ministers. Basically, when I had time to make my case, they were already packing their suitcases," he said.

You'd think that a steady stream of acclaimed films, from the 2004 Academy Award-winning animated short Ryan to the widely praised Tibet documentary What Remains of Us and the recent, possible Oscar contender Manufactured Landscapes, about the post-industrial landscape photographer Ed Burtynsky, would be enough for an NFB commissioner to state his case easily. Think again. The bigger challenges lie in having to explain that the NFB's reason for being isn't in creating commercial success stories.

Challenge No. 1: Convincing Ottawa that the NFB isn't the same as Telefilm Canada.

The NFB is about experimentation and socially conscious filmmaking, NFB'ers will invariably explain, while Telefilm is about backing Canadian movies with commercial potential. Bensimon goes so far as to argue that Telefilm basically functions as a bank, while the NFB is out to break ground with films that wouldn't likely get funding anywhere else.

Yet, in the eyes of many observers, the NFB has been playing an increasingly Telefilm-like role by backing co-productions with private film companies and other institutions. When Bensimon started his term five years ago, 7 per cent of the NFB's films were co-productions, he said. Now it's 43 per cent.

However, the projects the NFB backs must push the creative envelope or the agency isn't interested. For instance, the film board co-produced Arctic Mission, a series of five films three years ago exploring climate change and the changing Arctic. When filmmaker Jean Lemire wanted to continue the project in the Antarctic, the NFB declined because it felt the idea was no longer groundbreaking, but merely building on its previous success.

So, because of its mandate, Bensimon said, the NFB often finds itself producing something innovative, but then backing out the next time, when that innovation becomes an industry trend. That would seem to be a tricky message for policy makers with little time and limited funds to grasp.

Then there's challenge No. 2: Explaining that "film board," strictly defined, is a misnomer. For instance, the NFB also has educational and outreach programs, such as the recently launched Nunavut Animation Lab, helping to set Inuit stories to film with high-end animation equipment provided by the NFB.

It has also been increasingly moving into multidisciplinary projects, many of which are Internet and cellphone-based and are becoming further removed from traditional filmmaking. One of the works from filmmaker Katerina Cizek in the NFB's new Filmmaker In Residence program, for example, is a series of photo blogs, not films, by young, homeless single mothers.

Cizek's objective in the Filmmaker In Residence project has been to find social-issue stories at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital. But her work isn't a kind of documentary version of ER. One short film has involved piecing together days of footage of her experience riding with a police constable and mental-health nurse as they respond to people in mental distress. She has also travelled to Malawi to make the widely screened short film The Bicycle about the AIDS crisis.

Filmmaker In Residence is the NFB's latest attempt to revive its Challenge for Change series of socially committed films of the sixties and seventies, and it's an important legacy for the NFB, Bensimon noted.

But sometimes the NFB seems to put the cart before the horse. Often the NFB's explanation about its social-policy films and its statement of intentions can, at first glance, overshadow the films themselves. But then something interesting happens. As Cizek's project has progressed, for instance, the story of her own filmmaking process, particularly as presented on the engrossing Filmmaker In Residence website (http://www.nfb.ca/filmmakerinresidence), has become central to the ultimate story of the films themselves. It's a common, fascinating trait of NFB projects.

Yet, as Bensimon noted, the NFB's emphasis on innovation rather than commercial success puts the organization in "a constantly fragile situation. Why? Because you're constantly breaking new ground and therefore taking the risk."

Talking to other NFB watchers candidly, many describe a certain state of flux surrounding the NFB these days. Regime change typically brings uncertainty. Yet the NFB currently has a busy schedule of productions in the pipeline, including a film by director Deepa Mehta described as a non-scripted drama (as opposed to a documentary) on spousal abuse in the South Asian community, as well as an IMAX project, likely an international co-production, setting Maurice Ravel's opera L'enfant et les sortilèges and using a new form of stereoscopic animation.

So despite the emphasis Bensimon often places on socially conscious filmmaking when discussing the high points of his term, that isn't all that the NFB is about, he said. He came in "knowing full well what our strengths had been at the NFB and trying to build from that rather than reinvent the wheel. And that's what I wish for my successor."

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