After 8 years, head of Telefilm Canada is signing off
Outgoing executive director has been an agent of change for national film industry
It’s like a cliché out of a bad movie. In the early 1990s, when Carolle Brabant was an auditor at Telefilm Canada, she visited a Vancouver production company that was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about her visit.
“It was winter, January,” Telefilm’s executive director recalled on Monday afternoon, sitting in the Old Montreal office that would be hers for just 48 hours more. “They put me in a room with a broken window. So the wind was coming in. I had to put things on my papers so they didn’t blow away.”
Brabant, tellingly, didn’t get discouraged; she seized the opportunity.
“I think that, from the beginning, what allowed me to advance as an auditor and to help me understand the objectives of my job is that I was able to sit down with producers and with people internally and listen to them, to see what their preoccupations were, to exchange with them, see how I could help them and how we could work together.”
Brabant retained an open ear during her 28 years at the federal film funding agency, which she left this week after eight productive years as its head. The first woman to occupy the position, she has brought about important initiatives in gender parity, funding for Indigenous film and for emerging talent.
What allowed her to rise through the ranks, consistently defy expectations and, simply put, get things done, is she never threw her weight around.
It wasn’t always easy. Despite her successes, Brabant faced resistance at every turn. When she was named Telefilm’s general director in 2010, she remembers some people questioning what an auditor was doing leading the country’s most important filmfunding body.
“They thought it was a monumental mistake,” she mused. “From the beginning I said, ‘I’m not here to tell you what to do. You’re the producers, the experts. You have to tell me what we have to do as an organization. What are your concerns? What are the changes we must make to make Telefilm a better organization?’ That took them by surprise.”
Born in Montreal to a Québécoise mother and an angloOntarian father, Brabant grew up in Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, attending the “very strict” all-girls public school Marguerite-De Lajemmerais. She dropped out of CEGEP, deciding it wasn’t for her, and held various jobs — including cinema cashier and bank teller — before discovering a passion for numbers.
She was in her late 20s, living with her journalist husband in Saguenay—Lac- Saint-Jean, and had decided to go back to school. She enrolled in the only class that fit with her schedule: accounting, which to most people might have seemed a total bore.
“It was like magic,” she said. “I really loved it. It corresponded to my pragmatic spirit. At the same time — this might sound strange — I saw it as a kind of creativity. There has always been a side of me that is a bit creative and wants to do things differently.”
Following four years as a chartered accountant, she and her husband decided to return to Montreal. Scanning the classifieds, she noticed a little ad for a job as Telefilm’s first auditor.
Brabant has occupied many positions at the institution over the years. After completing an MBA in international relations and information systems in the late ’90s, she was named director of information technology and administration; she has also served as director of finance, human resources and corporate resources. She served as interim director for six months in 2004, until her predecessor, Wayne Clarkson, took over as executive director in January 2005.
“Slowly, Telefilm trusted me,” she said, “and offered me jobs that allowed me to grow within the organization.”
That insider perspective turned out to be her greatest asset. As the only executive director hired from within the organization, she had a deep knowledge of its strengths and weaknesses — which may have allowed her to more boldly envision change.
“Changing things is hard,” Brabant said. “That’s something that hit me when I arrived at Telefilm. I thought, naively, coming from an accounting firm … that I was coming into an environment where people were not afraid of change. That’s something I really underestimated.”
She implemented her vision incrementally during the past eight years. Among the achievements she is most proud of are: Telefilm’s success index, which shifted away from relying only on domestic box office results to include foreign sales, recognition at film festivals, and awards; its gender parity by 2020 initiative, which is already revolutionizing the Canadian film landscape; and more than doubling support to its Talent to Watch (previously called Micro-Budget Production) program, focusing on emerging filmmakers. But she won’t take all the credit for these milestones.
“All along these eight years, all these projects have been done in collaboration with all the employees at Telefilm and everyone in the industry,” she said. “I’m happy we have been able to put the accent on talent rather than the organization, to help (our filmmakers) shine and to contribute to their recognition on the international scene.”
While she is stepping down and stepping away from Telefilm, Brabant admits it will be tough to leave it all behind. She intends to spend the next few months catching up on Canadian and international films, and keeping tabs on a few files that are close to her heart — particularly gender parity — until a new executive director is named.
Down the line, she envisions continuing, in some capacity, to be involved in film financing.
“I don’t know how I will be able to contribute,” she said, “but we are in a time where it is becoming difficult to finance content and to assure diversity in content. I don’t want to end up with just content financed by mega-multinationals who control a lot of what ends up on screen. We have to find new ways to finance independent content. I’m interested in taking part in that discussion.”