Apologies in The Walrus magazine, December 09

Check out Mitch’s cover story on government apologies in The Walrus magazine, December 2009 issue. The Walrus is one of Canada’s best magazines, with a national subscription base of over 60,000 readers. 

http://walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.12-society-a-sorry-state/

Geddy Lee and Margaret Atwood say you should read it…

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/weneedthewalrus

Apologies documentary gets green light

Our partners at TVO have recently given our documentary Apologies the green light for production.  ACCESS, Knowledge, and SCN will participate in the project as well.  Once we close our financing, production will begin in 2010.

We’re very excited to work with our co-producer Josh Miller at Panacea Entertainment, and our commissioning editor Jane Jankovic at TVO.  TVO’s documentary strand The View From Here has a reputation for insightful POV documentaries, and we feel it’s a perfect fit.

Canadian Media Fund Consultation in Whitehorse

On October 1, Mitch Miyagawa took part in the Whitehorse consultation on the proposed changes to the Canadian Television Fund, now called the Canadian Media Fund (CMF).

The new CMF will change the way media is created in Canada.  Find out more here.

At the consultation, Mitch raised several points, from the perspective of an independent producer in northern Canada:

- reworking the regional production incentive program to “front-load” development of new projects, rather than top-up existing projects
- difficulty financing the proposed mandatory “second platform”
- great opportunities and challenges for northern filmmakers with changes to definition of “broadcaster”

Overall, Up and Away supports the position of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC).  Read more about their position here.