Selling Canadian Films Abroad

When Charlotte Mickie first met Thom Fitzgerald at a Toronto Film Festival pitch event in 1996, his back was up. At the time, Mickie was managing director of international sales at Alliance Atlantis and Fitzgerald informed her, rather snippily, that her fellow executives at the company had rejected a script of his called The Hanging Garden. Struck by Fitzgerald’s personality – which she describes as “ornery but charming” – Mickie read it. Although she found the script somewhat confusing, it was also a bold and original work so she decided to buy it for foreign sale. Although she later heard rumors that the production process was challenging and the edit difficult, early reactions to the film were enthusiastic and it was screened on the opening night of Perspectives Canada at the festival.

“If you’re in the acquisition business as well as the sales business, as I am, you have to trust your gut feeling about these people. So I think it’s important [for filmmakers] to get out and meet sales agents, and there are a lot of opportunities to do that at conferences and other industry events.”

It’s good to follow up

Filmmakers should be politely persistent, says Mickie. Fitzgerald, she points out, got away with his attitude because he was very charismatic as well as talented. It doesn’t work for everyone. Sometimes she’s so swamped with work that it takes her quite a while to respond, and there are times when she’s grateful that filmmakers have contacted her again to jog her memory. Often, she believes that people don’t follow up because they’re afraid that hearing nothing means Mickie has rejected it, which may not be the case. So hearing from someone again can be important, within reason. “I don’t think following people into bathrooms and harassing them to death is a good idea,” she adds, with a look that suggests it has happened.  

As a sales agent, Mickie sells internationally to theatrically driven distributors who see Canada as providing a relatively shallow pool of films, although the best of them are equal to the best in the world. And Mickie is mainly interested in a certain type of film. “The Canadian films I’ve typically passed on are the ones that I think of as being made to go direct to DVD. They’re movies that make me think of television, in the old-fashioned, non-HBO way. They’re simply too middle-of-the-road, too formulaic.”

Canadian films sell internationally

Defining the characteristics of a Canadian film – a longstanding parlour game in this country – is difficult, even for Mickie. One stream, she notes, encompasses films made by and about people representing cultural groups that are part of the modern diaspora. These would include filmmakers like Deepha Mehta, Atom Egoyan, Ian Iabal Rashid and others. Another stream is made up of films that are similar to independent U.S. films, but with a slightly different sensibility.

However, when asked to pinpoint that sensibility, Mickie admitted it’s hard to do that too. Referring to critic Katherine Monk’s study of Canadian film, Weird Sex and Snowshoes, Mickie laughs. “It’s true, there is that weird sex thing you find in Canadian films, but also there’s something I sometimes find a little problematic, a certain emotional distance.”

In both Canadian and American films you’ll find similar plots and circumstances, because, she points out, “I assume the concerns of a 25-year-old filmmaker from Toronto aren’t that different from a 25-year-old filmmaker in New York.” But thinking of Noah Baumbach’s indie hit The Squid and the Whale, she says “there was a lot of emotion and a tremendous sense of humour in that movie. Americans create a sort of warm mixture of dysfunctional family, humour and genuine emotional moments. I think if a Canadian was doing a similar movie it would be a little cooler, a bit more angst-y, the people would be a little bit more repressed.”   

Rather than theoretical definitions, it’s easier to talk about specific films. For example, Mickie points to Jean-Marc Valee’s C.R.A.Z.Y. as a film that is hard to imagine being made anywhere other than Montreal. And Zacharias Kunuk's Fast Runner is “quintessentially Canadian, or maybe the right word is 'northern'.”