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Globe and Mail
6 days ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
The NFB's new strategy: milk the ‘Stream Canadian' moment and reinvest in creativity
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 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.'
Montreal Gazette
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
Actor Jay Baruchel only too happy to provide all of the voices for Bread Will Walk
Movies And TV By Jay Baruchel didn't need any arm-twisting to agree to lend his voice to the brand-new National Film Board animated short Bread Will Walk. In fact, he was so into this extraordinary 11-minute film that he agreed to do all 10 voices in the short film! 'Number one, it's just gorgeous and wholly unique,' said the former Montrealer in a recent phone interview from his home in Toronto, explaining why he agreed to jump on board the film created by Montreal director Alex Boya. 'I can't explain its look or tone to anybody, which is a rare thing,' said Baruchel, who has appeared in the films Goon, Knocked Up, BlackBerry and Million Dollar Baby. 'It's like nothing meets nothing. I don't know how I would possibly describe what Bread Will Walk is and in 2025 that's a rare special thing to be treasured. There is not one piece of phoney inside of Alex Boya. There isn't a phoney bone in his body. He's as authentic an artist as I've ever worked with and I felt it watching it. When I saw this f---ed up Grimm's Fairy Tale, it reminded me of the scariest stories my mother would read to me as a kid. Then on top of that I really liked what he had to say about the food industrial complex and the inherent predatory nature of free-market capitalism.' Bread Will Walk is kind of a reverse zombie-apocalypse movie. The zombies are peaceful beings made of bread and it's the hungry living who're trying to eat the zombies! It's not The Walking Dead. It's The Walking Bread! Like in any zombie flick worth its salt, the setting is a world on the verge of collapse with a little social critique thrown in for good measure. It's about hunger, nasty food multinationals and a media world gone mad. The basic story is simple: An older sister is on the run with her younger brother who is indeed made of bread. Bread Will Walk is set to have its world premiere on Thursday in the Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival. 'It started off with a dream,' said Boya, on the phone from Cannes. 'I had a dream many many years ago about a man who was faceless, who had a jet turbine on his head instead of a face. In that world you also had a scene where someone pulled my hand, I was trying to get away from this industrial wasteland, and someone held on to my arm and then my whole arm was ripped off. But it wasn't an arm. It was a baguette and there were crumbs everywhere.' It took Boya four years to make the film using paper and 2D animation mixed with digital collages. It's built around 4,000 ink-on-paper hand drawings. Baruchel does 10 different voices in the film, using styles of voice that range from a guy who sounds like an older Louisiana man to someone who sounds like a BBC announcer. He also sings the jazz standard All of Me. 'It appealed to my hubris,' said Baruchel. 'He said: 'Do you want to do the work of 10 people?' And I'm like: 'Yeah! Absolutely I can'.' Doing voice work is old hat for Baruchel. One of his highest-profile roles on the big screen was voicing the character Hiccup Haddock in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, but even that was far from his first experience doing voices in animation. 'I have spent years at a microphone figuring out a way to make my voice suit an animated story,' said Baruchel. 'When I started my career, when I was 12 or 13, I worked at Astral Tech a lot on Ste-Catherine St. near Fort (St.). I would dub French TV shows into English, live action and animated. That was like boot camp for voice recording. So that put me in a good place to do How to Train Your Dragon, which turned into three movies and eight-plus years of a TV series. It is now a place in the world that I am as at home in as anywhere else. 'I'm plus à l'aise in doing a voice because nobody's looking at me and it's devoid of vanity. I'm not worried about my complexion or my hairline or my posture or any of these things. All I'm doing, in a pretty pure way, is just creating with no ego, no sense of personal aesthetics. When you take away a camera, you take away a microscope and any superficiality, which is a necessary evil of being a person who gets makeup put on their face and stands in front of a camera and lights. So it becomes this really pure almost childlike channeling of your imagination.'
