Voices have recently been raised on the importance of capitalizing on Quebec talent in the film and audiovisual industry. There was a plea by the dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in favor of a national strategy on the development of Quebec know-how.1
Previously, the producer and host Marie-France Bazzo had called on Prime Minister François Legault to launch a “Quebec cultural offensive” in the manner of the Koreans or the Danes who flood the Netflix of this world and demonstrate, by the very fact that investing in culture pays off.
The Association of Directors of Quebec (ARRQ), which has more than 800 members, fully subscribes to the need to support the development of our local talents in order to meet the growing need of foreign productions that choose Quebec as their film set. .
However, we maintain that a national strategy for the film and audiovisual industry must prioritize local production to ensure the vitality of our cultural expression by creating quality Quebec content that is competitive on the world stage.
To achieve this, our creators must have access to tools and resources comparable to those of their colleagues in other countries if we want our stories to shine. No matter how much we train the best artists and artisans, if they only tell the stories of others, they will only contribute to the marginalization of their own culture.
Typically, American productions come to shoot here monopolizing our best technicians, our best equipment and our best studios because they can afford it. But they come with their directors, their stars and their scripts. Meanwhile, we put the ax in the sweetest dreams of our own creators to bring them into starving budgets.
Keep dreaming
Certainly our talent and our creativity can compensate. Miracles exist and some of our productions and some of our creators manage to stand out against all odds. But miracles cannot be the norm. And it’s certainly no stranger to the fact that too few of our television and film works transcend our borders.
Quebec directors want to continue dreaming. They dream of budgets in the service of their art rather than the other way around. They dream of studios devoted to Quebec production where we could shoot 12 months out of 12 in a country called winter. They dream of sets to build or “virtual” sets that would put all of Quebec on stage. They dream of green production infrastructures where we could attract the stars of audiovisual creation, whether they are producers, creators, suppliers or labor trainers. They dream of extraordinary special effects that they often cannot afford while some of their best artisans are here and working for others.
In fact, they dream of a government that invests massively in its culture so that Quebec can take its place on the national and international stage.
In today’s universe, “blue space” is most of the time a small rectangle of bluish light that catches the attention of the world’s population. It is on the screens that the cultural battle takes place. In Canada, the biggest music distributor is called YouTube. It is this music and these images from elsewhere that our young people listen to every day. We have to make sure that Quebec content looks good there. Quebec is an incubator of extraordinary talent. There is no reason why we cannot profit from this resource other than by lack of political and economic will.
At a time when a Quebec director like Denis Villeneuve dominates the world box office with an essentially American work, I therefore invite our government to dream with us. It will not be all to train talents, it will be necessary to know how to retain them by giving them the means of their ambitions so that they speak about, and for, us.
I am therefore sending to our Prime Minister, our Minister of Culture and all those for whom Quebec culture is important these few words borrowed from one of our most famous fictional characters and written by director Pierre Falardeau: ” Think big, stie ”.
1. Read “Let’s focus on local talents and know-how” 2. Read Marie-France Bazzo’s text What do you think? Express your opinion