The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

their own community-oriented spaces with the some of the same tools used to build the
“master’s house.” ( , ed., 2002, p.193)
Film Circuit and its 200 affiliates spread across Canada is the active engagement
of moving through the interplay of cultural hegemony and counterpublics (again, as
described in Chapter II). What makes Film Circuit so interesting and crucial to this study
is that it is a kind of hybrid response to the problem of Canada’s cinema(s). It is not a
radical intervention in the Zimmermann sense, nor is it a corporate marketing ploy posing
as grassroots, otherwise known as “astroturf” (Beder, 1998; Patel, 2005). It is an initiative
created with one of the elements of Canada’s cinema problem space, the
distributor/exhibitors not in an effort to reform their political economy or even their
standard practices, but rather their associative structure and the spaces where they ‘do
business.’ There is a certain Trojan Horse element to Film Circuit; Haynes has found a
way to get more diverse content, including documentary and Canadian works, into
commercial cinema spaces, by establishing a fair playing field for all three stakeholders
(the thirds split mentioned earlier). Like Dodds and Achbar, Haynes is rightly concerned
with building an audience, and says: “We need a more concentrated effort to get these
films into the mainstream and most of all we need to build an audience.” (Ibid, p.5) It’s a
building process that is not happening completely outside the dominant sphere of
commercial cinema, but rather smaller spheres that introduce the margins slowly, are
being built inside the otherwise impenetrable Hollywood fortresses of mainstream
exhibition sites.
The ‘mainstream’ that Film Circuit is operating in extends across the country, and
includes very small communities like Bowen Island, BC, as well as larger communities
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