Canada's National Film Board Soars at NewImages

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Of the seven XR projects selected for this year’s Quebec spotlight at the NewImages Festival, all but one originated from the Montreal Interactive Studio branch of Canada’s National Film Board (NFB). More than a victory lap for the French Canadian branch, this recent festival perch offered another testament to the benefits of public investment in a still-nascent artistic discipline.

“Without public investment the business simply would not exist,” says Montreal Interactive Studio executive producer Louis-Richard Tremblay. “These are new tools, new mediums, so if no one is willing to take creative risks, the field wouldn’t be there. Public money allows us to create an entire ecosystem.”

Since 2009, the Montreal Interactive Studio has supported more than 150 projects. With an annual budget of at least $1 million devoted to original productions, and yearly remit of two to three finished titles, the publicly funded outfit has played an outsized role in nourishing the local talents who, in turn, have shaped the wider industry.

“At the NFB, our mandate is to explore new forms and possibilities,” says Tremblay. “Without seeking profitably, we can simply develop work and this is a great privilege, as it allows creators the opportunity to [research and innovate] without spending their time looking for financing.”

Presented out of competition at this year’s NewImages, Theodore Ushev’s “The Blind Vaysha” is itself an iteration, a new-media VR remix of a 2016 animated short that won prizes in Annecy and was nominated for an Academy Award. This kind of iterative workflow is very much part of the Montreal studio’s mission.

“Each project is an exploration that carries elements into each subsequent one,” Tremblay explains. “It’s like a prototype lab. We’ll finished a work, but we don’t stop pushing, [because] a completed project can be reapplied, and the talents behind them that can go and take that work to parallel industries.”

Presented in competition at NewImages this year, the NFB co-produced “Plastisapiens” took home the Impact Award, winning prize-money and public esteem for an eon-spanning mash-up that collapsed the distinction between organic and synthetic life with a playful touch.

The studio is currently in production on “Second Souffle,” a large-scale installation designed for the Montreal Botanical Garden, that explores the process of phytoremediation, and “Les têtes ailleurs,” another interactive installation that uses architectural marvels to plumb the depths of the human psyche.

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