BC’s documentary makers can’t pinpoint when, exactly, their business model began to fall apart.
But they’re virtually unanimous: the industry is in crisis.
“I think it’s the worst period for documentaries in Canada in the 28 years I’ve been in the television business producing current affairs programming,” said David Paperny, president and co-founder of Vancouver-based Paperny Films.
Paperny launched his wbusiness in 1994 when a slew of new cable channels were getting licensed and Canadian broadcasters were commissioning hundreds of documentaries a year.
“Documentary was my passion and my business,” said Paperny, whose 1993 documentary, the Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter, was nominated for an Academy Award.
“But [Paperny Films has] slowly shifted with the times in order to stay in business, from a full-on documentary production company to a company that produces lots of other factual programming – lifestyle, reality – but very, very little documentary.”
Boris Ivanov is president of Interfilm Productions Ltd. His company’s documentary, Family Portrait in Black and White, won as best Canadian film at the Hot Docs 2011 film festival.
Ivanov said he’s watched the market for documentaries worsen dramatically in the last three years.
Michaelin McDermott, a director of the B.C. branch of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC BC) and president and director of documentary and feature film company Bedazzled Pics, estimated that DOC BC’s membership has dropped 20% in the past two years.
“There are people that just can’t do it anymore,” she said.
“Some people have perceptions of artists being happy to be starving artists in lofts, but nobody really wants to do that; nobody really wants to mortgage their house in order to make a film.”
Among documentary sub-genres, McDermott said the top casualty is, ironically, the form that put Canadian filmmakers on the global map back in the 1950s: the point-of-view documentary, which explores an issue or story through the filmmaker’s eyes.
“The creative, one-off, point-of-view documentary is totally under siege,” she said.
Paperny added that the key problem doc-makers face is that the industry’s funding model – TV licence fees – hasn’t changed, despite doc slots disappearing.
McDermott added that provincial policy has further disadvantaged local doc-makers compared with their Ontario and Quebec counterparts, who benefit from better tax credits. B.C.’s decision to scrap the HST, she said, is going to exacerbate the problem.
To survive in the current climate, many local companies, like Paperny, have turned to hotter markets, such as reality TV, lifestyle programming and documentary series.
Ivanov said that with his small company’s limited overhead, he’s managed to keep making documentaries longer than most in town. But he said that won’t be for long.
“We’re definitely now thinking about series, docu-soaps, so more toward reality, because that seems to be the only thing that you can finance.”
Losing documentaries, Paperny said, will hurt the whole local filmmaking industry. With their smaller budgets, he pointed out that documentaries provide a key arena for cultivating young filmmakers.
“Once you eliminate documentary production, you eliminate the next generation of TV producers and filmmaking entrepreneurs because you eliminate a very important entry point into the business.”
He said without that, young filmmakers are limited to being “directors for hire” on the higher-budget series that rule the day.
“They become freelancers working for companies like mine, and I’m lucky to have these people, but it’s different than if they were on their own, starting their own business with their own vision, their own passion, their own way of doing things.”
As the local industry struggles, doc-makers are trying to develop new funding models. Paperny would like to see documentaries generate revenue through theatre distributions.
Ivanov pointed to Internet sites that solicit public contributions to fund projects and others where people pay a fee to view a documentary.
He added that it may fall to the next generation of filmmakers to figure out the way forward.
“I’m hoping that young people will figure out a way to monetize their content on the Internet or somehow raise funding, because I don’t see documentaries recurring on television anytime soon.” •
