Heritage Minister Oda on the healthy of Canadian cinema: It's not a question of talent; let the market decide.

Playback Magazine has a interview with Heritage Minister Bev Oda and gets her to talk about the state of Canadian cinema, and sadly not much new is offered.

What are your thoughts on the health of the feature film industry in Canada?

Oda: First, we shouldn't compare the English-language sector and the French-language sectors. They're different... they work in two different kinds of marketplaces.

The success of the French-language film sector in Quebec is commendable and has potential to become greater. The situation there is you have a smaller captive market... it can create its own star system, because it has very strong promotional and marketing tools right within the French-language community.

The English film industry competes with the American film industry. We have a marketplace here where we're competing with films that are made at multiples of the budgets that we can afford. The other thing that challenges the English market is that we don't have promotional and marketing vehicles that survive in isolation of the Americans.

Are screen quotas the answer?

Oda: I don't think so. I can walk you into a Cineplex, but I can't force you to buy a ticket for a Canadian movie. I'm going to buy a ticket for the movie that I've heard about, that I want to see. So even if we ordered the screen quota... you can't force people to buy a ticket to go and see a particular movie. That's the reality.

So, how do we increase the box-office performance of English-Canadian films?

Oda: It's not a question of talent, it's a question of whether we can create the interest in Canadians to go to the theaters to watch Canadian films. Other countries have had success competing within a realm of larger American movies, but it's a different situation that we live in. We've got to look at a different business plan - we've got to see where the key investments can be.

So, back to the drawing board once again. What's so distressing about her answer is that it's not simply a matter of going to the local Cineplex and buying a ticket for a Canadian film, because Canadian films are not being played at your local Cineplex - and if they were, they have so little marketing on TV, the web, and out in the real world that we are barely aware they even exist.

On to pt.2 - The curious case of Young Triffie