Every October the Croisette in Cannes in the south of France filled with buyers clutching lanyards and sizzle reels. Somewhere in that crush sat Nathalie Bourdon, with a vault of 7,000 films behind her. That year she had India on her mind.
Bourdon was director, distribution and market development at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). She had been coming to Mipcom for years. For her, it was where she shook new hands, caught up with old buyers and saw where the business was heading.
The NFB had between 6,000 and 7,000 titles in its catalogue and added 40 to 50 new ones each year, split between animation and documentary. Bourdon did not push them all down one conveyor belt.
“Each title had its unique way to get into the world,” she said. “We needed to follow those unique ways, specificities, and then we sold it to the market, the broadcaster, the platforms.”
That year’s calling card was The Anta Claus of the South Pole, a new animated TV special from Canadian animator Cordell Barker. The NFB made it with Tonic DNA, an independent studio in Montreal. Crave, Bell Media’s streaming service in Canada, had already bought it. The rest of the world was up for grabs.
Barker was NFB royalty. His The Cat Came Back, about a man who could not get rid of a cat that kept coming home, was still one of the board’s best-loved shorts. He was exactly the sort of filmmaker the NFB existed to back.
“We really cared about the talent,” said Bourdon. “We were like an incubator, and we took the time it took to produce an animation that would be top of the art, innovative, pushing the boundaries.”
That patience had filled a trophy cabinet. The NFB had 79 Oscar nominations and 12 wins. In 1989, the Academy had handed it an honorary award for overall excellence in cinema. Bourdon pointed to the Oscar-nominated The Girl Who Cried Pearls as proof of what happened when filmmakers got the time and freedom to chase a big idea.
She was just as keen on partners. “Canada was one of the best partners to do co-production,” she said, citing the country’s co-production treaties and its deep bench of animators. At the NFB, working with others went hand in hand with taking creative risks and letting a film take as long as it needed.
Then came the pitch. “We were always open for business with India, to co-produce or to sell our work.”
Bourdon admitted the NFB had barely a toehold here. She saw traffic running both ways. Indian buyers could dip into the Canadian vault. Canadian and Indian animators could share a drawing board.
Indian studios with a story to tell and a stomach for risk knew where to find her. She would be the one in Cannes with 7,000 films and an open diary.
