Canadian Film Article

When was the last time you saw a Canadian film that showcased Indo-Canadians or South Asians as dynamic and vibrant members of the Canadian mosaic. The situation, according to some South Asians working in the film industry as actors, production personnel, writers and directors, is somewhat akin to what the Black community faced in the United States at the hands of the big bad wolf known as Hollywood. It was not until black filmmakers and artists began telling their own stories in their own words that a new image of black culture and community emerged in the nineties.
Currently, the Hispanic community is taking a similar approach as the Black community in getting their image on the right track with more stories about their experience and what it means to be Latino in the United States.
In the 1970s and 80s, Hollywood stereotyped Blacks and Hispanics in films that can only be described as "White-washed" WASP stories, where minorities were nothing more than window dressing in the forms of pimps, drug dealers, whores and criminals.

Black artists such as Spike Lee fought back vigorously and refused to let Hollywood dictate to them what stories about the Black experience they could tell and how they would go about telling them.

Through the course of films like She's Gotta Have It, Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X, Lee's personal crusade brought forth a new perspective on urban Black culture and showcased to the world the unique and vibrant black experience from the present to the past. From the mid eighties and through the nineties, the hard work of black filmmakers like Lee, who single-handedly took the mantle of Black Cinema and ran with it like a ferocious lion, has borne fruit as Hollywood discovered a niche Black film-going market, which enthusiastically supports black films.

Now Black stories are sought after by small and large Hollywood studios, which are financing low to modest budget films that are becoming successful at the box office and in return are giving birth to new generation of Black artists - actors, musicians, writers, editors, cinematographers and directors.

However, the situation in Canada for South Asian filmmakers and artists, and for that matter Chinese and other ethnic filmmakers, is so dire that if the government, through it's film funding agencies, does not address the inequity now, the set back to a thriving ethnic film scene, where we'll be able to tell our own stories in own words, will not become a reality in the near future.

"Something needs to be done in a hurry," says K. Mali-Anant, a young South Asian screenwriter and filmmaker. "The way the film funding agencies are set up right now, they're all tilted in favor of the White Canadian filmmaker and White corporate film entities. And if you are an ethnic filmmaker - you're shit out of luck because by the time the agencies have finished dolling out to all the White filmmakers - there isn't much left for us."

Provincial and federal film agencies like BC Film and Telefilm Canada hand out millions of taxpayer dollars to independent Canadian film producers and production companies every year to finance films, most of which end up seeing may be a week's worth of time in the theatres with not too many Canadians able to see the films which supposedly portrays the Canadian experience. The funding or investment into films is on top of film tax benefits for indigenous producers.

Telefilm Canada, for example, has an annual budget of $200 million dollars for it's various feature film and television programs, but not even .1 percent of that goes to ethnic filmmakers even though the taxpaying ethnic communities make up close to 20 percent of the Canadian population.

"This is completely unfair and unjust," Mali-Anant says. "They need to create something similar to the programs they have for French language production and the small Aboriginal film program. There seems to be so much propaganda about there being not enough money for Canadian filmmakers but compared to what is available for ethnic filmmakers - they're swimming in it."

It must be clarified that the money handed by the film funding agencies isn't automatic and is only given once all the requirements, including the important creative and business criteria, have been successfully met by the applicant. Each application that is submitted to the funding agency is reviewed by independent reviewers and staff of the funding agency.
But the reality is that the criteria and the programs are tilted in favor of White Canadians, whether they be French or English. And this inequity must be addressed by the government, if they seek to create a truly dynamic multicultural society, whereby all minority communities will be able to tell their stories through the medium of film and television.
Aaj Magazine recently spoke in length with Hertiage Minister Sheila Copps, who is in charge of Telefilm Canada through her ministry, about this inequity and what she plans to do to alleviate it.

"I have set up two committees to look into this issue," Copps tells Aaj Magazine during her visit to a Surrey Sikh temple. "In fact - I've gone further by setting up a series of discussions across the country, where we can bring minority communities and the cultural agencies face to face. This is where you can talk directly to Telefilm people and tell them exactly what you feel is lacking."

This reporter presented Copps with a proposal called Visible Minority Feature Film Fund (see full details on next page), which sets out to create a independent feature film and television fund for visible minority communities. Copps was non-committal about establishing such a fund, but said she would take it to the Telefilm board and the committees to study the proposal further.

"I'm aware of the inequity and this is why I'm setting up these initiatives to look into this gap," Copps said. "I want to know how Telefilm is addressing this or how much minority production the CBC is doing."

Private sector money goes hand-in-hand with public funding for feature film and television production in Canada and Copps encourages ethnic and visible minority businesses to get involved in feature film funding to boost ethnic production.

It's not that the funding agencies haven't funded ethnic productions. In fact, there have been a number of feature and television films that have been produced in Canada that have had leading South Asian, or Chinese or Latin American characters. Some of these films include Sam and Me, Masala, Such a Long Journey, the dismal Burning Season, Seducing Marya and Double Happiness to name a few. The CBC recently attempted a television movie based on the life of Province crime reporter Salim Jiwa called Jinnah On Crime: Pizza 911. It was largely an uneven production, sometimes laughable, in the producers attempt to mix journalism and detective fiction in an ethnic setting.

"This Jinnah thing was a total joke," Mali-Anant says. "Not only did it end up consuming $3 million of taxpayers money, but their attempt to have a white-washed production of the undoings of a second rate reporter, who has been proven to be unethical, serve as token ethnic production is absolutely disgraceful."

"The producers of Jinnah were so out to lunch that they had this main lead as a Muslim and his wife's name in the film is Manjit, which is a Punjabi and most likely a Sikh name. There is no explanation as to how these two ended up together because a Sikh/Muslim marriage would be ripe enough with dramatic tension to deserve feature film treatment," Mali-Anant says.

Mali-Anant notes that with the $3 million that was consumed by Jinnah - they could have made 6 medium to low budget size ethnic stories with real punch and pizzaz. "We want to see our own stories, made by our own artists and filmmakers, instead of this white-washed garbage that we're being fed," he says.

Canadian film funding agencies need to look South of the border, where Indo-American production, financed through public and private sources, has jumped from 0 feature films five years ago to a dozen productions a year presently.

The output has included a number of critical and box office successes, including ABCD (American Born Confused Desi), Wings of Hope, American Chai and American Desi, which was produced for about $250,000 and ended up making more than $1 million at the box office just in North America.