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

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."

Stursberg, who once chaired the Canadian Television Fund (CTF), has nothing but sympathy for those who got burnt by the recent crisis in funding cuts. Apart from the CTF's structural confusions and "gigantic governance problems," the Canadian television industry needs to think about audience as much as the film industry does. Stursberg compared the CTF's focus on "how much we make" to the old Soviet Union's manufacturing industries that congratulated themselves for meeting state quotas without worrying about whether anybody would actually buy its products. "This might have been all right in the early days, when you were preoccupied with building an industry," Stursberg continued, "but the industry is developed now. The question is: can we take the next step and actually make stuff that people really want to watch? The audience numbers for Canadian television are probably the worst in the industrial world."

As for the kind of films Stursberg thinks the industry should produce, he rejects the emulation of Hollywood at its most standardized, particularly the megaplex blockbusters. "We're never going to make those kind of movies," he said, "and if we told ourselves we're going to compete against the studios, that would be crazy. We're in the independent-cinema market and that's what we've got to be preoccupied with." Stursberg also believes that original, distinctively Canadian work doesn't mean pictures that are "festooned with beavers." They are Canadian because "they derive from a certain world view, a certain wryness, a sensibility that is a result of how we live." As for the "Great Canadian Search for Identity": "We know perfectly well who we are. Surely we're too mature as a country, too sophisticated to worry about that sort of stuff. That's for teenagers."

As Stursberg pushes for an audience-oriented consciousness that will move Canadian moviemaking "into a different sort of paradigm," he also reaffirms Telefilm's commitment to personal moviemaking and youthful experiments. For instance, while the agency has backed crowd-pleasers like Mambo Italiano and the Ginger Snaps films, Telefilm is "perfectly happy" with Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. Moreover, it has "sliced out a piece of money reserved for films whose prospects may not be as strong commercially but that are important. We're putting almost 20 per cent of the money aside for smaller films."

Smart film projects with commercial potential are tricky to identify and to produce. Alfred Hitchcock, who mastered the commerce of film as brilliantly as he did the art, is one kind of model. Hacks cranking out dumb comedies and glorified soap operas are another. Clearly, Stursberg wants to avoid grabbing big numbers with anonymous mediocrity and agrees that sometimes the so-called art-house picture can be the one that earns the bucks. Denys Arcand's Le Declin de l'empire americain demonstrated this in 1986, and his Les Invasions barbares has done it again in 2003.

Telefilm couldn't ask for a better film than Les Invasions as a model of what it says Canadian producers and directors can achieve. It's an intelligent movie expressing deeply personal emotions (Arcand's portrayal of a hospital reflects the nightmare his own parents endured), and audiences eat it up. A strategic co-production with a foreign partner, Les Invasions came close to winning the Palme d'Or and did take home two awards, indicating that a movie rooted in a particular Canadian place can have universal appeal.

Stursberg, whose background is in the cable and satellite industries, is a realist. Though confident about the future, he doesn't claim success is guaranteed. "The jury is out," he says, "and we'll see." Meanwhile, he is getting a big kick out of the ride he's on. "The film industry's financial structures are exceptionally complicated and its judgments are exceptionally sophisticated. It's a hard way to make a living, so the people who are involved in it tend to be exceptionally dedicated and very clever." Above all, the industry is "fundamentally about imagination" and that's exciting to a man who was once involved in, businesses that were more about hardware than celluloid dreaming.

Maurie Alioff is Take One's Associate Editor.