Lindsay Blackett

“I sit here as a government representative for film and television in the province of Alberta and I look at what we produce, and if we’re honest with ourselves.… I look at it and say ‘Why do I produce so much shit? Why do I fund so much crap?'”

– Alberta Culture Minister Lindsay Blackett
at the Banff World Television festival

3 Comments

  • PeterInEdmonton says:

    That comment sent me off to scan the program of the last couple of major Canadian film festivals that I attended. The only Alberta content I could find for the 2009 Toronto festival lists a 5-minute short called “The Island”. You could possibly include the 43 minute “Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands” because Andrew Nikiforuk (who used to rant on Radio 1 locally under the guise of a enviornmental reporter) is listed as a writer but the program credits it as a Greenpeace Toronto production.

    I found a feature called “45 RPM” listed as an Alberta/Saskatchewan coproduction in the 2008 Vancouver festival program, but from the description, I’d emphsize Saskatchewan. I also saw a listing for a 12-minute short called “Tigers at the Gate” by a Nina Shudar of Alberta.

    I have not seen any of these films so cannot comment on the quality, but that’s
    a pretty low output, considering Alberta’s wealth and population. I have seen some other Canadian films at these festivals and would say that their programming committee’s standards are fairly generous.

    I confess to some guilt in not catching any Alberta shorts at the most recent Edmonton film festival as I have been satisfied with the quality in the years before that.

    How relevent is this posting to a CBC-related website? Not much, so, Teamaker, if you choose to dump this posting, I will understand. I note that the CBC doesn’t show a lot of Canadian features in prime time any more, let alone Albertan movies if they did exist. Where’s the venue for shorts? I know one person who watches “Heartland”, which was later complemented by Blackett. I don’t know anybody who watches Little Mosque on the Toronto Idea of Prairie.

    I saw a Canadian film on TV recently that I enjoyed very much (“Everything’s Gone Green”). I stayed up late and saw it on Bravo.

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