Canadian movies, curated by stars
New VOD service Canada Screens offers playlists by the likes of Tatiana Maslany
Want to go to the movies with Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany? Or how about catching a film Jason Priestley thinks you’d love?
Canada Screens, an all-Canadian video-on-demand service launching Thursday at canadascreens.ca and nfb.ca, one-ups other streaming services offering Canuck titles with a unique feature: the menu is chosen by Canadian actors, filmmakers and movie insiders from among their favourite homegrown flicks.
Joining Maslany and Priestley are Michael Dowse, Atom Egoyan, Sarah Gadon, Paul Gross, Robert Lantos, Guy Maddin, Don McKellar, Zoie Palmer and Sarah Polley. They’ve come up with lists of Canadian movies they want to share, with more curators coming on board.
“A lot of people just don’t know Canadian films, but they’ll know Tatiana Maslany and Jason Priestley and (they’ll wonder), why did Jason select these films?” explained Anita Adams, executive director of the First Weekend Club (FWC), a national group that encourages people to support Canadian films by seeing them during the crucial first weekend of release.
A joint project between FWC and the National Film Board of Canada, movies cost $3.99 to $5.99 to view or they can be purchased for $9.99 to $15.99 at CanadaScreens.ca. The service offers both mainstream and indie titles and will start out with about 50 movies, growing to 70 soon after and then expanding weekly.
Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (soon to be added) and Dowse’s The F Wordstarring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan are among the recent titles. CanadaScreens’ library only goes as far back as Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe (1991), which will join the service soon after launch. More listings and older titles will be added as movies are made available for streaming.
“The tough part is a lot of the titles have not been digitized for online or they have American distributors and we can’t get access to them. We have to work with Canadian partners,” Adams said, adding film distributor eOne has given access to all of its Canadian titles and “they own a massive catalogue.”
Revenues are split with rights owners, said Adams, adding all of those approached have been eager to partner.
As for the curators, Adams said it was interesting how many picked the same movies. For example, more than half selected Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 Inuit film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Black Robe and David Cro- nenberg’s Eastern Promises were also among the most popular titles, she said. The most overlap on two lists came from directors Michael Dowse, director of Goon, and Guy Maddin, maker of “docu-fantasia” My Winnipeg. They matched on 50 per cent of titles, said Adams, including Hobo with a Shotgun, Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated Incendies and two Trailer Park Boys features.
Adams said this service differs from Starlight, the all-Canadian movie channel pitched by Gross, Lantos and Cronenberg and denied mandatory distribution by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in 2013.
“We wanted to do so something a little different. Let’s turn to people in the industry and ask them to curate the content,” said Adams. “When searching you can click on a couple of different curators and genres and whatever falls into those filters will show up.” Canada Screens will stream through NFB.ca, which already provides about 4,000 free and paid titles, now expanding with more docs and dramas through online partner Cinéma Excentris. More than 450 English and French VOD titles will be added to NFB.ca this year, including 115 independent films and 50 new NFB titles in April.