That's a good question, because one of the pillars of programming at the film board is working with la relève. In fact, when I arrived at the National Film Board five and half years ago, I found a system that I thought wasn't working so well, because they were sort of thrown into the traditional, in documentary, one-hour documentary, or in animation, into auteur animation of seven or eight minutes. That's an enormous task for an emerging filmmaker to try to deal with. I thought it didn't do them a service, and it was costly.
So we put in place what we call our emerging filmmaker programs, and these are to work in short film. What was interesting—and I'll come back to this question of risk, because it touches on this—was that we were driven by a notion of how we actually get to have that sense of who the emerging artists are, where the talent is coming from, and how we give them the kind of encadrement support they need.
So we created a short film program. Everybody asked five years ago why we were doing short films, because no one was going to see them, and I said, don't worry; they'll be seen.
A number of things happened. First of all, we created short film programs. For example, in documentary momentum, it is a typical thing that we start by bringing people into workshops with the top people in the field. We allow them, then, to submit a proposal for a short film on a theme—a 10-minute film. We select it for those.... The key here, in terms of that transition from whatever background they come from, whether it's film school or another discipline, is to surround them with the top talent, so they are being produced as if they were going to be doing a feature documentary. They have our top producers working with them. They have the top editors. They have the top cinematographers. Suddenly, their game is being lifted from the start by this process.
It's become world-class in terms of the programs we've created. We now have interest from around the world asking to model things. We've done that in animation. Where before, emerging artists were working three or four years to finish a film, they're finishing a short film of 30 seconds to one minute in three months through a hothouse program with the same thing—bringing in the top experts. This year in our hothouse, our partners in Brazil were so impressed they sent two young animators to take part and be part of that process. We've had queries from Korea about this. We're creating something different and terrific.
The kicker in all this, and this is what's interesting—I want to talk a little about risk-taking—is that short films have taken over the world. It started out with people asking why we were doing this, because it's not the traditional hour. Well, within the first year, our first short film documentary programs....
We did in fact partner with CBC Newsworld. They took it. But quickly, the web became the site. It's become the thing to have short films. We have the ability to market this all around the world and find audiences.
The way we take risks—and this is important, and it's what you can't do in the private sector, what Telefilm, for example, can't do and what CBC can't do.... If we're process-driven, if we understand what it is we want to do, whether it's with emerging filmmakers or with new art forms, we ask if we can define the process, if we can define how we want to think about something, but we don't define the end product. We don't define what we're going to end up with, because the moment you define the end product, you've closed off creation or possibility. If what you've done is say that we know already where we're going, you're not going to get any surprises, which means you're not going to get the magic. What we've found is that again and again we've been driven by a notion of process, and it's resulted in incredible pieces of work.
Now, with this emerging filmmaker program, we've had films go to Sundance; one went on to an Oscar nomination. It wouldn't have happened with predefined forms.