Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee. It's my pleasure to be here speaking with you guys about the cultural hubs issue that you so courageously decided to tackle.
As Madam Chair indicated, my name is Ana Serrano. I'm the chief digital officer of the Canadian Film Centre. I'm also the managing director of Canada's only media and entertainment technology accelerator, IDEABOOST.
I want to start this conversation with all of you today by articulating three specific points of view about what a cultural hub could be.
First and foremost, the Canadian Film Centre, which is situated north of downtown Toronto, at Bayview and York Mills, for the past 30 years has been accelerating talent across the film, television, music, acting, and digital media sectors. Based on the experience we've had as a really efficient, effective wealth-generating network of stakeholders in the media and entertainment ecosystem, we believe, based on this experience, cultural hubs need not necessarily be so predicated on a place-based strategy. Indeed, cultural hubs, especially today in the digital age, could be seen as distributed networks of services—as spaces, of course, but most importantly as people-driven networks. That's one part of this intervention that I'd like to share with you, that we think cultural hubs should be seen as distributed networks.
Of equal importance is the notion that cultural hubs, to be more effective in especially today's climate, typically will need to be more interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral. They will need to focus on being embedded in real live experiences, lived experiences, of the cross-section of networks they serve and in the specific domain, in this case arts and culture, they might be focused on. In much of the work we are currently doing at the Canadian Film Centre, we have started to stitch together not just media and entertainment talent and content creators but also technology start-up founders and community spaces that are embedded in communities, whether that's the library system, specific other communities that we're working with, subject matter experts in areas that we might be interested in exploring as part of our content productions, and so on. There are all of these types of stakeholders. Typically, when we look at a cultural ecosystem, we only think of the parts of the ecosystem that are attached to the production value chain—for example, from those who produce the content to those who distribute the content—but increasingly we're finding that playing with the other sectors that touch on or are adjacent to this production value chain makes for richer conversations amongst the stakeholders involved.
Last but not least, another thing we've discovered is that a hub is only good if it is actually connected to other hubs internationally. It's very important. Although we may be looking at creating these vibrant, intersectional, inter-sectoral spaces and networks in our communities in Canada, unless they are also somehow connected to other spaces abroad, their impact is likely limited.
These are the three things we'd like to discuss further. I'll repeat them for you: the notion that the cultural hub is actually increasingly becoming a distributed network of individuals and interdisciplinary teams; we need to think of hubs across sectors; and we really need to think about their reach and impact at a global level.
Thank you.