TENANT PR OFILE

Left to right: C FMDC Executive Director Lauren Howes, Technician Rebecca Gruihn, Educational Development and Outreac h Larissa Fan, Membership Coordinator Genne Speers, and Technician Intern Eva Kolzce.

CANADIAN FILMMAKERS DISTRIBUTION CENTRE (CFMDC) STUDIO 119

Every day independent Canadian experiment al, short, and documentary films are making their way into programming for festivals like Images (Studio 448) and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and onto screens at international biennales or Queen Street West galleries. How does this happen? Well in some cases its the direct result of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC, Studio 119) doing its job. A job it has been dedicated to doing for forty-two years now . CFMDC represents over 75 0 filmmaker members who keep their artistic collections with the centre and rely on its well-established relationships to get their work in front of audiences. This is not the only way that films make it to the screen, but it can be a vit al connection for many filmmakers to exhibition opportunities. C FMDC Executive Director Lauren Howes describes the process as being community based there is an interconnected web of artists and exhibitors with CFMDC acting as a facilit ator. They are all reliant on each other to make it come together , or in Laurens words: our survival depends on their survival. The primary exhibitors for the 2 700 films in C FMDCs catalogue are festivals, galleries, and educational institutions. CFMDC is definitely in a specialty nic he, there is no question about that, but we always have been. I think our specialization in experiment al, short, and documentary film is the strength of the organization. Operating as a non-profit, the C FMDC is reliant on arts funding from the Canada Council and Trillium Foundation among others to keep things running. T he centre charges distribution fees and deals almost exclusively with paying cli ents, but seventy percent of what is charged goes directly to the artist. T his is a foundational part of h ow the centre does its business and while it means that they are not generating revenue, it ensures that the f ilmmakers are being paid fairly for their work. New filmm akers and films come to CFMDC regularlyalmost eighty percent of new work they receive is unsolicited. They look at everything that comes in and rarely deny adding it to their cat alogue. Lauren and her team work carefully to create an appropriate distribution plan for eac h individual film. Given the timing of our interview with Lauren, we couldnt ignore the current, lets call it economic situation, and it did come up in convers ation. There was some knocking on wood and hesit ation to s ay that things were ok ay so far, but it does seem that the centre will weather the storm. In reality, this is not the first financial downturn they have made it through and Lauren is convinced that their relevancy as an organization will keep them afloat. Lauren feels that if the arts and artists were properly acknowledged as economic generators, this battle would be far easier. I would love to see the arts get the recognition it deserves relative to contribution to the economy as forestry or the auto industry does talk about a softer footprint. T he arts arent getting bailed out in the greater economic downturn. Lauren readily admits that C FMDC is far behind the technological curve and part of their recent strategic plan is to upgrade their systems and t ake a lot of what they do online. Lauren imagines the website functioning as a really effective port al to the collection and sees social networking models as a template for ways that the site could open up the membership to new opportunities. At the same time CFMDC is balancing the convenience and access provided by digitizing work in their collection with a strong belief in the need to preserve celluloid, the filmmakers who st and behind it as their preferred medium, and encouraging festivals to continue to screen in this format. The lightning speed of the digit al shift has caused some significant changes, such as 401 neighbours Gallery 44 (Studio 120) having one of the only darkrooms left in the city for processing film. Filmmaking has not been immune to this shift, in large part because it is so much cheaper to produce work digit ally. But Lauren sees celluloid holding strong. Toronto has a really active film community. Celluloid has become a specialty but remains a c hosen canvas for many artists. Its alive and well in Toronto but its dependent on film stock, and independent labs being available. T here are also great resources like the Liason of Independent Filmmakers (LIFT) who provide equipment and the Images Festival that has a strong mandate around showing work on 16mm that make the scene pretty vibrant. Were lucky that Toronto has become a film epicentre, which is now unique in the world. www.cfmdc.org