The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) will be at Cannes for a second year running, this time with Patrick Bouchard’s animated short The Subject. Produced by Julie Roy, the film has been selected to screen in the 50th-anniversary edition of the Directors’ Fortnight, a section organized by the French Directors’ Guild and held in parallel with the Cannes Film Festival. This year’s Directors’ Fortnight takes place from May 9–19. The Subject is the first of Bouchard’s films to have made the cut of this international lineup. After Cannes, it will go on to screen in competition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, which runs from June 11–16.
The National Film Board of Canada has signed two new deals with broadcasters and online providers in the People’s Republic of China, which will see acclaimed NFB animation and documentaries available on CCTV-10, the science and education channel of China Central Television, as well as the Bilibili web portal.
The National Film Board of Canada’s commitment to exploring vital global issues, and producing groundbreaking works by Indigenous and culturally diverse filmmakers, will be on display at the 2018 DOXA Documentary Film Festival (May 3–13) with Velcrow Ripper and Nova Ami’s feature documentary Metamorphosis (Clique Pictures/Transparent Film/NFB), the short films To Wake Up the Nakota Language by Louise BigEagle and Three Thousand by Asinnajaq, as well as a special screening of Vancouver filmmaker and producer Selwyn Jacob’s The Road Taken.
Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square is flooded. Mature trees grow through cracks in the sidewalks, people commute via canoe and grow vegetables on skyscraper roofs. In this radically different future, urban life is thriving.
The NFB’s French Program Documentary Studio, in collaboration with Quebec’s Institut national de l’image et du son (INIS), Réalisatrices Équitables, and Femmes du cinéma, de la télévision et des médias numériques (FCTMN), is launching Les femmes de métiers, a series of four conversations offering an invaluable and up-close look at the experiences of women artists in the film industry.
Dream is musician Philippe Lambert’s first virtual reality work as a director. Beginning April 10, the 10-minute creation will be available online all over the world, in 2D and 3D WebVR, at nfb.ca/dream. Dream will have its world premiere at the fourth MUTEK_IMG Forum for Digital Creation, taking place April 10 to 13 at the Phi Centre as part of the official lineup of events at this year’s Montréal Digital Spring. Visitors to this free presentation at MUTEK_IMG will be able to experience the VR work lying down, engaging fully in the creators’ virtual dreamscapes.
On March 22, the National Film Board of Canada will launch Indigenous Cinema (#NFBIndigenous), an NFB Web page offering free streaming of more than 200 new and classic titles from its unparalleled collection of films by Indigenous directors—including 20 new and recently added films.
This year’s lineup of National Film Board of Canada (NFB) documentaries at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (April 26–May 6, 2018) showcases diverse stories of people facing life’s biggest challenges—with premieres of five major new feature documentaries in the festival’s Canadian Spectrum program.
The immersive documentary Roxham will make its world premiere as a virtual reality (VR) installation in Particles of Existence, an exhibition of 10 first-class immersive works at Montreal’s Phi Centre from March 27 to August 12, 2018. As of March 24, the work (which is approximately 15 minutes long) can also be viewed in both English and French online in VR and 360-degree at nfb.ca/roxham.
The National Film Board of Canada’s Quebec and Atlantic Studio and LJH Films are reaching out to emerging and established Nunatsiavummiut filmmakers from or in Labrador who have an interest in documentary storytelling, with a call for submissions for the Labrador Doc Project.
Samara Grace Chadwick’s National Film Board of Canada co-produced feature documentary 1999 (Parabola Films/Beauvoir Films/NFB) will have its international premiere at Switzerland’s prestigious Visions du Réel International Film Festival, April 13 to 21.
From June 11 to 16, 2018, the National Film Board of Canada is taking part in the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, with five shorts in competition. The NFB roster includes the return of renowned filmmakers Alison Snowden and David Fine with Animal Behaviour (Zoothérapie). Premiering at Annecy, Justine Vuylsteker’s Étreintes (Offshore/NFB) is the first film made on the “Épinette,” a recently restored French pinscreen-animation device. Patrick Bouchard returns to the festival with the international premiere of Le sujet (NFB), while Elizabeth Hobbs’s film I’m OK (Elizabeth Hobbs/Animate Projects/NFB) will be having its world premiere. Screening in the Perspectives section, Un printemps by Keyu Chen (NFB) rounds out the NFB’s lineup of shorts, which features mostly women filmmakers—with a diverse range of skills, employing a variety of techniques, and backed by several female producers. The complete Annecy Festival program will be announced at a press conference on April 23.
The names of nine finalists were announced today for the 10th Concours Tremplin, a competition launched by the National Film Board of Canada in collaboration with Radio-Canada, aimed at emerging filmmakers from Canadian francophone minority communities outside of Quebec. With women accounting for the lion’s share this year, the finalists are Emmanuelle Chapados (Memramcook, New Brunswick), Nathalie Hébert (Scoudouc, New Brunswick), Sylvio Belliveau (Memramcook, New Brunswick), Josiane Blanc (Toronto, Ontario), Sophie Houle-Drapeau (Sudbury, Ontario), Ania Jamila (Ridgeway, Ontario), Nassima Way (Calgary, Alberta), Yoann Priolet (Delta, British Columbia) and Camille Vernet (New Westminster, British Columbia). Submissions came in from francophone communities outside of Quebec across the country. Finalists will attend workshops on March 19 and 20, then submit their projects to a jury for final deliberation in May, with the winning works to be broadcast on ICI RADIO-CANADA TÉLÉ. Radio-Canada has partnered with the NFB on Tremplin since 2007.
For the 10th consecutive year, the National Film Board of Canada is bringing together acclaimed Canadian filmmakers to create short cinematic tributes to Canadian performing arts legends, as the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards (GGPAA) gets set to honour laureates at its 26th annual Awards Gala, taking place June 2, 2018, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
Adopting a concrete strategy for increasing the number of women creators in Canada’s audiovisual industry, the National Film Board of Canada has announced that it will make its Talent Bank for female professionals accessible to Réalisatrices Équitables (RÉ), Femmes du cinéma, de la télévision et des médias numériques (FCTMN) and Film Fatales. Talks aimed at reaching a similar agreement are also underway with the Vancouver, Alberta, Toronto and Atlantic chapters of Women in Film and Television. These partnerships will increase the impact of the database, bringing its profiles to the greatest number of industry players.