Snow came tumbling from the sky in Vancouver last Thursday. Only the brave took to the roads, and among them were Maureen Palmer and Helen Slinger, who make documentaries through their company, Bountiful Films.
They came to talk to me about their upcoming doc Cat Crazed (airing on CBC in February), calling it "a fun take on an important environmental story - the world's unprecedented cat-overpopulation crisis." It includes animation by Cordell Barker, who did the classic, Oscar-nominated 1987 film The Cat Came Back. But the two Vancouver-based veterans also came to talk about the dire situation for documentary filmmakers in Canada right now.
Slinger and Palmer, both in their 40s, have worked together for years. Maureen claims Helen fell for Maureen's dog, Jake, which Helen doesn't deny. They both worked at CBC, and now they make serious, gripping docs - Leaving Bountiful, How to Divorce & Not Wreck the Kids and most recently, Mounties Under Fire, to mention a few.
First, about Cat Crazed, Palmer says: "The cat is the world's most popular pet, and the most disposable. Some 100 million cats, domestic and wild, roam the North American landscape, wreaking havoc on native flora and fauna, and forcing well-meaning humans to take sides in a cat-bird war. Cat Crazed asks for a new relationship where all cats are loved and none are abandoned."
Fair enough. I'll watch anything that features kitties. But a more pressing issue is the state of documentary making in Canada. Everyone on that side of the business says there is a crisis.
There is always an undercurrent of complaint in the Canadian TV racket. There is always somebody claiming that a catastrophe is unfolding. But in the matter of documentaries, the complaining is more than a rumble of discontent. The noise is loud and persistent.
Palmer and Slinger seem well positioned to explain. Their work is good, not obscure. Their first major work, Leaving Bountiful, about a woman escaping a polygamist community, drew more than one million viewers on Global in 2002. So I asked them, "What is the biggest problem facing documentary filmmakers right now?"
"By and large, the abandonment of documentary by Canadian broadcasters," Palmer says. "Save for Doc Zone and The Nature of Things on CBC, and a very few specialty-channel slots on Bravo! or W, it's a very small area. A curious dichotomy exists in Canada right now. Canadian documentary is lauded worldwide. We pioneered the art form at CBC and the NFB [National Film Board of Canada] We've got a world-class documentary forum in Hot Docs and our docs are nominated for Academy Awards.
"But support for docs has largely disappeared on mainstream television. Programs like The Lens on CBC were incubators for doc makers. So was Global Currents on Global. They're gone. CTV isn't doing docs at all any more. Educational broadcasters, the NFB and places like SuperChannel do commission docs, but they are few and far between and they do not offer licence fees that you can live on."
But, I ask, if our documentaries are good and acclaimed everywhere, why is the field shrinking on television?
"I don't know," Palmer says. "But I have a few theories. Perhaps programming and promoting a one-off documentary is expensive, compared to commissioning a doc soap or factual entertainment series. Factual entertainment is drawing very respectable numbers in Canada. Perhaps we made some bad films! Perhaps it's partly political. Perhaps documentary lovers are now able to access first-class docs via the Internet, film festivals, Netflix and the corner Blockbuster, so why should a broadcaster deliver them?
"Those of us from older generations are now approaching our work with a more entrepreneurial bent. I'm not saying all of this is a completely bad thing. New models for funding may develop. To survive, we must bring the same level of creativity to our entrepreneurship as we do to our films. I don't want this to come off as whining, because Bountiful Films has been incredibly fortunate. But we do know there's a rich, talented pool of doc makers in Canada who are not able to make a living off making films."
Slinger adds, "A lot of the great stuff people are accessing online or at festivals was made possible by funding, even just seed funding, from broadcasters. We totally get the need for broadcasters to reach an audience, but as documentary strands disappear - and the more eccentric strands have disappeared entirely - there's a narrowing of the bandwidth on the kind of stories that will ultimately be told and will reach a wider audience. We're not saying that TV is the only audience any more, but it [television]still seeds so much good work. We'll all struggle to find new ways to fund and make the stories that matter, but how is certainly not obvious at this juncture."
And that was the essence of our conversation. I had to leave to get to the airport. Later, Palmer e-mailed to say that after I had left the restaurant, they had shared the piece of toast I had left behind. "That's not a reflection on Bountiful Films' financial status. We just hate waste."
All joking aside, there's food for thought in the conversation. The country's culture can't survive on fiction and fluff. We used to be known for making many and great documentaries. Now, not so much.
AIRING TUESDAY
Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (Bravo!, 9 p.m.) is a case in point in the documentary field. It has been short-listed for an Academy Award for best documentary and it's the only Canadian doc so honoured. Made by Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont, it was developed in association with Bravo! and had a theatrical run in Canada and the United States, where it will now be seen in 50 cities. Tuesday's airing is the 88-minute version, 40 minutes longer than what was previously broadcast.
Check local listings.