TORONTO - The National Film Board of Canada finds itself on the brink of reinvention as it grapples with new technologies that are revolutionizing the art of storytelling, chair Tom Perlmutter says as the venerable film agency marks its 70th anniversary this weekend.
"We've got a hell of a lot on the go and the ambitions are so great," Perlmutter says ahead of the board's birthday on Saturday, noting its multiplatform experiments include webisodes, mobisodes and 3-D technology.
"We've set up a kind of 3-D stereoscopic lab and we're kind of exploring a range of different things. We'll be making announcements within the next months."
The headlong charge into new territory comes as the board seeks to reach out to a digital generation with a radically different approach to seeking and consuming visual arts.
The NFB was born in an era of war and its earliest black-and-white images depict a country struggling with unemployment, national identity and its place in the world. Part news outfit, the board distinguished itself by reporting from the front lines and chronicling historical milestones in a pre-television era.
Throughout, it racked up accolades, including 12 Oscars and more than 90 Genies,for groundbreaking documentaries, animation, shorts and features that both enlightened and entertained.
"The moments in which it really soared were at times when there was that kind of conjuncture of technological innovation, social change and a kind of this creative seizing of the moment," says Perlmutter.
"I think we're at that kind of conjuncture now in terms of that shift in terms of digital, which is in some ways much more profound."
Events to mark the 70th anniversary include a retrospective at the upcoming Hot Docs festival in Toronto, and commemorative shorts commissioned by acclaimed directors including Benoit Pilon, Alanis Obomsawin, Jean-Francois Pouliot and Guy Maddin.
In January, the NFB put hundreds of its documentaries, animation and fiction work online for free. Among them are classic favourites like 1952's "Neighbours," 1985's "The Big Snit" and 1988's "The Cat Came Back." In March, the board received a Gold Medal from the City of Cannes, France.
As a boy in Winnipeg, "The Cat Came Back"'s Cordell Barker would go to the movies and sit enthralled by NFB shorts that would run before the main feature. And when he grew up to become an accomplished animator, he was determined to make a series of his own shorts for the prestigious organization.
"It just seemed like ...if I did three films for the board, short films, that that sort of validated me as a filmmaker," Barker says from Winnipeg after recently completing his third film, "Runaway," bound for Cannes next month.
Cuts hurt NFB's reputation
There were weak times at the NFB, too, most notably in 1996 when Ottawa slashed its funding by $30 million, a devastating blow that he says amounted to roughly a third of its budget and cost the board nearly half its staff.
If the NFB has a lingering reputation for being an old and musty institution, it stems from these dark days, says Perlmutter, noting the blow also closed NFB libraries across the country.
"At that time they had a limited number of choices of how do we connect to audiences?" says Perlmutter.
"The easiest way was to say, `Well, we're going to do television and most, if not everything we do has to go on television.' ...But it joined the myriad of products on television so it got a little bit lost. There was a little bit of an erosion over that time."
Perlmutter says the board is still recovering from that hit, comparing it to an amputation. He says the board now gets roughly $60 million from Ottawa and another $7 million from other sources.
It's also keen on developing new avenues for revenue. Perlmutter says that involves developing the NFB as a global brand -- he evokes the market penetration of HBO and Disney as models -- and possibly seeking partnerships with groups like iTunes to boost sales.
"We have 13,000 films in our collection. It's a massive effort to digitize all that, a massive amount of investment. We can't just do out of our operating budget -- we have to think, `How does that get financed and what are the spinoff benefits, both to Canadians and to the industry for having these kind of things done?"'
"At this point, like everyone else, we don't know what that economic model is, we don't know how it'll translate into kind of what those revenue streams will be like but we'll get there."
Whatever form that takes, a substantial online presence is crucial, he says.
"That's really the key driver."
Perlmutter says the NFB will soon be embarking on a massive, multiplatform, interactive project that examines how Canadians are grappling with the current economic crisis.
"It's going to be a remarkable project -- it'll comprise films, it'll comprise an extensive online engagement, interactivity with Canadians across the country."
TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey called the NFB "central to and essential" to Canadian filmmaking, saying he was excited by its "really innovative interactive filmmaking."
"What I like is they never stand still, they keep kind of developing new ideas, new ways of telling stories in film," Bailey said.
Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal said the NFB has only gotten more important to Canadian filmmakers as the industry has been strangled by the economy and waning political support.
"The NFB is perhaps the single-most important bastion of support for feature documentaries in this country right now," Baichwal says.
