Inuit Production company fights to get funding
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Iglulik (Oct 30/00) - Filmmaking turned out to be more than telling a story for the owners of Igloolik Isuma Productions.
The Iglulik-based company has created the first feature-length Inuktitut-language film -- Anatarjuat (the Fast Runner) -- which they plan to release in December.
"We X-mened our way into the system," says Isuma's Norman Cohn, referring to the Canadian film industry and its financial set-up.
Two years ago, Cohn and his partner, filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, fought long and hard to be accepted into Telefilm Canada's application process for English language productions.
Funding rules had made it impossible for an aboriginal filmmaker to create a feature-length film.
While English and French language projects typically get between $1 million and $2 million in production funding, individual aboriginal-language film projects are limited to $100,000 subsidies, said Cohn.
Isuma successfully lobbied to be considered under the English-language fund and received $937,000 from Telefilm and the Canadian Television Fund.
The National Film Board, which will distribute the film, provided an additional $450,000 for the project, which cost about $1.4 million.
Isuma has always maintained it should be considered for funding the same way as any other Canadian production company.
"We'd be happy if there wasn't an aboriginal fund."
The latest fight with Telefilm involves tax credits with Revenue Canada. The financing structures for the aboriginal fund means a loss, across three previous film projects, of $134,000 in tax rebates that would have been possible had they been an English or French production company, says Cohn.
With the aboriginal fund, money that would normally qualify for tax credits in the English or French language categories falls into a category that disallows those same tax credits.
"We are no longer eligible (since the Aboriginal Fund was instituted) for tax credits that everybody else in the country can access," says Cohn, adding, "We pay taxes. Inuit pay taxes. We pay more GST. And we aren't tax beneficiaries."
Igloolik Isuma has won numerous awards and prestigious institutions sport Isuma productions in their collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York University National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Northern Peoples in Hokaido, Japan.
The company is currently questioning a funding refusal for French sub-titling from Nunavut's Culture Language Elders and Youth department.
