TORONTO - The National Film Board of Canada is putting hundreds of its celebrated documentaries, animation and fiction work online, allowing movie fans around the world to catch them for free.
The initiative is just one of the ways the NFB will mark its 70th anniversary this year and signals the board is embracing revolutionary changes that have been taking over the film industry, says NFB chair Tom Perlmutter.
"You just have to look around you and see how the media universe is changing," Perlmutter said Wednesday from the board's head office in Montreal.
"It was clear that where audiences were going, how they were consuming media, how they were interacting with media was very different from even five years ago and we had to be there, we had to be available, we had to connect with Canadians."
More than 700 films, clips and trailers are available on the film board's website.
The online collection dates back to the board's earliest days and is mostly made up of documentaries and animated shorts. Among them are classic favourites like 1952's "Neighbours," 1985's "The Big Snit" and 1988's "The Cat Came Back."
Acclaimed filmmakers with work on the site include Ryan Larkin, Alanis Obomsawin and Claude Jutra.
Films can be searched by genre, language and year, while experts and media personalities have posted suggested playlists and offer their perspective on NFB films. The NFB says it will add more material each week.
Perlmutter says it can be hard for the public to find NFB films, noting that when they show up on TV they are dispersed across the dial.
"It tends to get kind of lost in the noise of the thousands of hours available," says Perlmutter, previously the founding head of documentaries at Barna-Alper Productions, one of Canada's top production houses.
The film board celebrates its 70th anniversary in May.
Meanwhile, Perlmutter says the board is eager to dive further into experiments with 3-D technology, noting that NFB innovations have even drawn the attentions of big movie studios in Hollywood.
"3-D is going to transform profoundly cinema, television, the audio-visual sector over the next five, 10 years and we're kind of being able to do things that just can't be done anywhere else at the moment," he says.
A 22-minute 3-D film about French explorer Samuel de Champlain, produced for last year's 400th anniversary of Quebec City, was screened in L.A. for several studios including DreamWorks, he says.
"DreamWorks is taking a lead in Hollywood on this and they were just enthusiastic about what the film board was doing in terms of grappling with both the esthetics and the storytelling and how you create genuine emotional experiences and not just use 3-D as a gimmick," says Perlmutter.
The board is considering future 3-D projects for IMAX, and is looking at collaborations with the Montreal neurological institute and the Montreal symphony.
A survey of the NFB's online film catalogue - drawn from roughly 13,000 titles in the NFB archives - offers a dramatic sense of just how much the NFB, and Canada, has changed, he says.
"You're able to kind of get a sense of how we've changed, what's changed and how we've stayed the same and the values that hold us together. That's unique, that really is unique."
