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Take One's 2004 survey of Canadian features released in the GTA.

Article Excerpt
TAKE ONE has been tracking Canadian features released in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) since 1994 and published its first survey in issue #10, December 1995. * It seems appropriate to look back over the past 10 years and see if sense can be made out of this much-maligned--and much-loved--beast we call Canadian cinema.

The GTA is the largest market in the world for English-Canadian features, but has traditionally been weak on films from Quebec. A similar survey of Montreal releases would be radically different from this one. Of the 364 Canadian features released in the GTA during the past 10 years, 146 are listed here in descending order by the number of weeks they played in theatres, while a further 218 (representing 60 per cent of the total) didn't make it past the two-weeks-at-the-Carlton threshold and therefore are not listed due to lack of space. If a film only plays two week at the Carlton--an art-house/indie multiplex located in downtown Toronto--in all probability it means an accumulated audience of less than 100 lost souls.

FOR THE PURPOSES of focus and brevity, Take One zooms in on the dozen that surpassed the 16-week threshold. On first blush, what stands out is that five--Les Invasions barbares, The Red Violin, Les Triplettes de Belleville, Sunshine and Margaret's Museum--are co-productions. This is hardly surprising, since it has become the common method of getting Canadian movies made--at least the expensive ones with big-name stars--but it was not always so. When the original agreements were being signed in the 1970s, there was a great deal of hand-wringing about the watering-down effect on Canadian content. It turns out that Canada was ahead of the curve as the trend toward international co-productions became the standard practice with regard to financing film properties. The five co-productions break down into two with directors who are not Canadian citizens, Sylvain Chomet (Les Triplettes de Belleville) from France and Istvan Szabo (Sunshine) from Hungary, and the other three being directed by bona fide Canucks: Denys Arcand, Francois Girard and Mort...

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