IT’S AN UNDERSTATEMENT to say that, from the moment of its formation in 1983, the Canadian Independent Film Caucus (renamed DOC in 2003) was hardwired to become a cultural lobby force. Its focus was as much on matters of policy as it was on figuring out how filmmakers could operate viably. And that’s because these things are intertwined: Without good cultural policy, no “independent production” is likely to occur.
If Canada was going to have a sustainable film and television industry with viable businesses and secure jobs, then it was going to have to follow the example set by other developed countries in the ’50s and ’60s (France, Sweden, and Australia for instance) and create production funds to supplement extremely reluctant private-sector investment. Sitting next to the US free-market juggernaut, with all its power to dump cultural product in our theatres and on our airwaves, meant that Canada had to either take initiative or give up entirely and admit that our English-language market was nothing more than a cultural branch plant for Hollywood and New York.
Thus, in 1984, Telefilm Canada was born as the successor to the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC), which had been established inthe Canadian Film & Television Association (now the Canadian Media Producers Association). However, children’s, animation, and documentary productions were excluded. As far as docs were concerned, this exclusion rested on the misconceived and parochial notion that the genre was simply the prerogative of the National Film Board and the CBC, regardless of basic aesthetic questions of point of view, form, and length.
