We have a very different role.
I wish to make clear that the legislated mandate of the film board is to serve Canadians. It's not to be of direct assistance to an industry as such. So I'm very mindful of that, that everything we do has to be in service of Canadians, that we have to give value to Canadians. We have to do it in a way that operates in a kind of harmony and in interaction with the industry, that's certain, so we do it with the industry, and we do it with creators.
In terms of the functions, it's also a function of producing and distributing, and distributing in the wider sense means connecting with Canadians. You see, we're dealing with citizens. We're not dealing with, say, the traditional notion of delivering eyeballs to advertisers; we're dealing with the notion of engaging with the citizens of this country, by giving them access to points of view about their country from their fellow citizens that they might not otherwise hear. And how do we facilitate that beyond the production?
Now, even in terms of the production, it's not quite as simple as that, because what we do is to set ourselves strategic aims and goals in terms of the programming that drive what we do. Those strategic aims and goals don't mean we're simply going to sit there and say, okay, you're a filmmaker, you're going to come and give me a proposal. For example, the work we do in terms of emerging filmmakers—no one else does that, frankly. No one else has that level of interest to create a cinematic culture, to be able to develop and push that. What we've done is set that up. It wasn't that someone came to us and told us to do that; we said we have a responsibility here.
Our responsibility, another one, in terms of communities across the country, happened three years ago. I went up to Nunavut, and I think I was the first head of English production ever to do so. Nunavut has more artists per capita than anywhere in the world. They have an enormous graphic capability, and I thought we should work with them in terms of the film board existing for them as much as it does for communities in the south. What can we do with them? Can we work in animation? Can we give them a set of skills that will help us in terms of finding new forms of expression?
So we created a program, the Nunavut Animation Lab, which we did in partnership with IDC, with the Nunavut government, with APTN, driven by us, and the whole notion of that gets also driven by a notion of sustainability. We set up workshops in communities. We did it in Cape Dorset, Iqaluit, and Pangnirtung. We find the people who really have that kind of talent and want to work in animation. We then made a partnership with the Banff Centre for the Arts, because they could do an in situ kind of apprenticeship in terms of finishing a work there within a location. What was also of great concern to us was bringing Inuit artists down to a metropolitan centre, for example, which would put enormous stress on them, so how do we kind of manage their being away from home?
We've created a pilot project that's going to do a number of things. It's going to create, I think, remarkable animation. It's going to enrich our country. It certainly enriches our cultural institutions. But we've also thought about what happens afterwards. We've trained people to work on the computers, the digital animation and all of that, which stays up in the north. That means they can start to build an economically viable industry in the sense that when the government needs a PSA, or when they need to do local advertising, they can start to do that and deliver that themselves.
Those are the kinds of areas where we're spending significant sums of money. We're doing that in the Yukon. We're doing it in the Northwest Territories. We were doing it when we recently launched—which is not production—a pilot project, digital cinema in Caraquet, New Brunswick. We're seeking ways to give to smaller communities the experience of cinema, the experience of the works that we produce and others produce that is not normally seen in these small communities, in a theatrical setting. With digital cinema, we've spent and invested a significant sum of money to be able to do this and we've tested it out. The response in that community was, “My God, we are not forgotten; we are remembered by a federal institution”, which is remarkable. Now, we're going to expand that to four or five communities in New Brunswick in the fall.
Some of the range of projects are Cinematheque and our Mediatheque and our CineRobotheque in Montreal. We have literally 100,000 school kids going through there, learning animation. So I could keep going on in terms of the level of media literacy, the level of engagement with what it means, with both creation and also a national federal institution that says, this is Canada, and Canada is giving you real value.