The NFB's new strategy: milk the ‘Stream Canadian' moment and reinvest in creativity

Globe and Mail

4 days ago

The National Film Board has always been ahead of its time.
But the federal cultural agency, which has produced thousands of documentaries, animated films and interactive digital works since its inception in 1939 – collecting a dozen Academy Awards along the way – hit a particularly prescient nerve this past March when it launched its 'Stream Canadian' campaign, pointing audiences to the free NFB.ca streaming service.
'It was prepared well before the Canadian election,' and certainly any of Donald Trump's movie-tariff talk, says NFB chair Suzanne Guèvremont. 'It was something that we were reflecting upon, because in our new strategic plan one of our priorities is to elevate the awareness and esteem of the NFB. So when we came into the elections, we just said, 'Oh god, this is so timely.''
The response has been encouraging, with the NFB reporting a 25-per-cent increase in new online Canadian visitors to the site (the world's largest non-commercial streaming platform) compared with the same period last year.
Guèvremont is hoping to keep the NFB headline momentum going, too. Last week, she was at Cannes for the premieres of two NFB animated shorts, Martine Frossard's Hypersensitive and Alex Boya's Bread Will Walk, just a few days ahead of the organization's debut of its 2025-2028 strategic plan.
The plan (titled 'Sharing Our Past, Shaping Our Future, Stories for Today') prioritizes shaping the NFB for next generations and expanding its audience – not surprising directions given the current and intense war for eyeballs when it comes to the attention economy. But the plan also arrives after a period of years-long tension inside the NFB between its filmmakers and Guèvremont's predecessor, Claude Joli-Coeur, who was alleged to have prioritized administrative salaries over resources for content production.
Guèvremont, whose background in the development of Quebec's 3-D animation and video-game industries stands in contrast to Joli-Coeur's history in entertainment law, says that the NFB's current relations with the creative community are strong.
'We're engaging in dialogues with the creators, with the filmmakers – we have scheduled meetings every year, to give them updates on the strategy before it comes out,' says Guèvremont, who was appointed to a five-year term in 2022. 'We're really trying to make sure that when we make a decision, we inform them, we give them the rationale behind it. And we did make a promise to reinvest in production, which was part of the exercises that we did last year.'
Guèvremont acknowledges, though, that the NFB isn't exactly in a safe financial situation, noting that it has been in a structural deficit for the past eight years. Last year, the organization underwent a restructuring, eliminating 55 jobs, or roughly 14 per cent of its work force. The cuts have led to resources being reinvested into production, Guèvremont says, as well as lower administrative costs.
'This is a transitional year, so we are adapting our structures, adapting our teams and our boots on the ground,' she adds. 'We hope in the years to come, with the renewal of our funding, that we will actually be able to increase our budgets for production. Reinvestment is absolutely necessary.'
Another pillar of the strategic plan is to 'foster a culture of creativity and innovation,' a goal that may initially seem at odds with the NFB's decision last year to close its interactive studios in Montreal and Vancouver.
'We realized that what we needed to do right now was focus on innovation, so we stopped producing installation works, because those are really expensive – it was brick-and-mortar installations,' Guèvremont says. 'We needed to refocus on animation and documentaries and storytelling in innovative ways. We'll continue to foster that creation in all the different fields of the NFB.'
Just before Cannes, Guèvremont was in Ottawa to address the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which was holding consultations about the definition of Canadian content as part of its hearings over the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), and how much domestic broadcasters should contribute to the production of homegrown documentary programming.
'We're talking about real documentaries – not lifestyle or, you know, reality television," Guèvremont says, referencing the 'factual' programming more often favoured by Canada's big broadcasters. 'These are timely and timeless stories that you can watch and learn from, and they need to be protected.'
'The NFB is the largest producer of documentaries in Canada, but we certainly don't want to be the only.'