Does the question seem excessive? If we stick to Radio-Canada’s decision to drop the Gala Québec Cinéma without saying a word to the industry or its partner, it is. Especially since the television gala is a genre in perdition, victim of a lack of love that calls for a clean sweep. This admitted, we must broaden our gaze. Launched on Twitter by filmmaker Myriam Verreault, behind the admirable Kuessipanthis frontal question opens on a succession of gaps which highlight the harshness of the state company with regard to a cinema still in its successors.
The pandemic has given a Jarnac blow to cinemas, the theater of the first hopes of our filmmakers. Already losing attendance before the successive confinements, they only resumed a fraction of their attendance: 7 million admissions in 2021 against 18.7 in 2019. However, recalls Myriam Verreault, the successive freezes have also seen the abolition of the Harold Greenberg Fund by Bell Media, as well as the closure of the most important distributor of Quebec films, Seville Films.
The cold pandemics will also have been helpless witnesses to the amputation of part of the budgets of film clubs by the Society for the Development of Cultural Enterprises (SODEC) and the continuation of the gradual erasure of documentaries. Not to mention the erosion of the share of funding paid to French-language productions by Telefilm Canada, from 39% to 33%. Who wants the skin of Quebec cinema, then? Probably no one, but we look in vain for friends who wish her well. And Radio-Canada is not one of them.
We find a perfect illustration of this in his promise of consolation to Quebec Cinema. Public television itself drove the first nails into the coffin of the gala by moving it to June and imposing a shackles on it, the failure of which it should have the honesty to share. Reserve an evening in the programming of a variety show that has no cinematographic grammar or particular inclination to celebrate our seventh art, it exceeds the measure.
The director general of Télévision de Radio-Canada, Dany Meloul, responded to the loud cries of the industry by asking him to trust the will of the SRC to continue to promote films from here. This formula, other scalded mediums like the theater, the dance and more recently the opera tasted it. Nobody wants to be in that movie.
The cultural engine has made many popular radio-Canadian meetings purr. However, the state corporation has been satisfied with the minimum on the film front for some time. Our films are becoming increasingly rare on the air, whether on ICI Télé or Artv. When they are, it is very often hours of consummate ridicule.
If at least this “discretion” served the online migration. According to the Media Technology Observatory, a quarter of Quebecers swear by digital TV, another quarter remains faithful to their beloved traditional TV while all the others opt for a hybrid mode. But Tou.tv’s online offer does little to make the competition blush.
Quebecor saw the market to take. Fort d’Éléphant: memory of Quebec cinema, which already holds a section of our cinematographic heritage at arm’s length with its repertoire of some 250 treasures, the giant does not hide the appetite of its Club Illico, which already has great catches such as Baby sitter and niagara. Crave is also betting on this market. And it works for him very well. norbourg, New Quebec,Bootlegger Where Underground have all found refuge in the belly of Bell’s video-on-demand service, which these days offers 99 Quebec films gathered in a collection dedicated to them.
If you look hard, you can of course find some nice things on Tou.tv (like these days Antigone and Matthias and Maxime). But the offer there is half as small, the proportion of new products smaller and there is no catalog to bring them together. It’s still better than on TeleQuebec.tv, where you can find just a dozen Quebec films on demand.
But is this worthy of a public service whose mandate granted by the CRTC intends it to “contribute actively to cultural expression”? We doubt it. The gala has had its day, granted, but Radio-Canada’s duties with regard to Quebec cinema are not limited to this broken window. A national cinematography is shared and celebrated.
This requires at least prime-time broadcasts and a competitive online catalog. And, yes, also spaces for celebrations, insisted Friday the SODEC which invites the SRC to leave the frame by means of an interesting “creative gateway in Web fiction, television, cinema”.
More broadly, this episode recalls the need for in-depth reflection surrounding the mandates of the public broadcaster from which he is shamelessly moving away to play in the field of a competition that does not play the same game as him. Ditto for its generous sources of financing which it abuses by marrying the contours of the private sector in its choices and its strategies, whereas it should rather use them to energize a public mission of which it seems to have lost the primary meaning here.