Fast Runner crew fumes over slow subsidies

ARTHUR JOHNSON

When Norman Cohn devotes his energies to making a production of something, he’s fully capable of making the world sit up and pay attention.

Cohn got rave reviews from critics and won numerous awards and an international audience for Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner, his blockbuster movie filmed entirely in Nunavut with a all-Inuit cast.

Now his focus has shifted to Nunavut’s Department of Economic Development, which has been involved for months in a dispute with Cohn’s Igloolik Isuma Productions over labour rebates.

Cohn says his company qualifies for $175,000 in rebates under department guidelines, but he has been unable to get any firm commitments from officials that the money will actually be forthcoming.

What’s worse, he says, is the indications he’s had from department officials that a big chunk of the $375,000 budget for the newly-created Nunavut Film Commission has already been allocated for other expenditures, drastically shrinking the funds available for rebates. This has occurred, he said, even though the agency has been operating for barely a month.

Cohn says he’s now in a position where he may have to lay off as many as six employees at his company in Igloolik if the rebate money doesn’t come through.

“This has really offensively pissed me off,” he said in an interview this week. “For 15 years we have been lobbying for a small pot of money in Nunavut dedicated specifically to film making as well as a professional set of guidelines for a film agency.”

When the Government of Nunavut created the film commission, Cohn’s pleas and lobbying finally paid off.

But, he said, far from improving the situation for film makers, economic development officials have managed to make things even more bleak.

“This is really the worst so far,” he said of the rebate dispute. While he has been promised that a decision on rebates will be made by the end of March, “nobody has told us we’re going to get a cheque for anything.”

Under department guidelines, Cohn said, Isuma qualifies for $175,000 in labour rebates for the last fiscal year, and had been proceeding under the assumption that the money was available and would be paid.

But in an email earlier this month to Zacharias Kunuk, Cohn’s partner in Isuma, Reuben Murphy, the director of innovation at the Department of Economic Development, indicated that Cohn may have jumped to the wrong conclusions about the money available for rebates.

“Although the policy states that the labour rebate program maximum is $300,000, this is a ceiling figure and does not mean that this much is budgeted.”

Cohn said he is incensed that it is so tough to get information out of the economic development department, adding that he felt Sheila Pokiak, the new Nunavut film commissioner, has been put in the difficult position of having to implement decisions and live with allocations that had been made before she arrived.

He said that every other jurisdiction in Canada provides labour rebates for film projects, and that unlike Nunavut, procedures are in place to allow film makers to make reasonable assumptions about the amount of money they can expect to receive in rebates and build this into their budgets.

As anyone who has seen Atanarjuat knows, Cohn is not a film maker who goes in for Hollywood happy endings but prefers to resolve things so that lessons are learned. That should serve him well as he waits for word about his rebate application.