The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

There is a persistent idea that is manifest in Canadian journalism, academic texts
and popular literature that is so ubiquitous it edges close to becoming a great unexamined
and unchallenged truth. From well-known Canadian filmmakers to cultural bureaucrats,
over the past several decades the mantra has stayed relatively unchanged: Canadians do
not make films that Canadians want to see, let alone pay money to see. This argument is
based on several interwoven threads of thinking that, embroidered together, comprise the
cultural and economic articulation of the feature film industry (or lack of) North of
Hollywood. These manifestations all tend toward pointing to production as a source for
all the ills of the industry, and have been communicated with such clarity and conviction
by artists, academics and policymakers, that indeed a hegemonic discursive space has
been built around the disentangling of the Canadian feature film debacle. This
argumentation has obfuscated attempts to locate the "problems" of a Canadian feature
film market outside of the political economy and content analysis of production, and has
made difficult the project of forwarding distribution and exhibition as problem area loci
in this important discussion.
In 2006 Canadians went to the cinema 130 million times, (Profile 2007, 2007)
nearly as often as their American counterparts to the South, and that’s not where the
similarity ends. Of all the films Canadians were watching at movie theatres in 2006,
around 95 percent were non-Canadian works, mostly originating from the Hollywood
studio system, leaving just under four percent of screen space to be occupied by Canadian
content (it would be closer to two percent, were it not for Quebec’s cinema inflating the
numbers). Less than two percent were documentaries. In that same year however,
Canadian publics were engaged at sites not registered in these statistics – the spaces of
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