The proverbial sound of breaking glass heard this week around the Banff World Media Festival signaled a Canadian TV industry continuing an effort to break down barriers to female producers advancing their careers.
Canadian actors-turned-producers Chelsea Hobbs and Jovanna Burke in Banff launched their own banner, Grand Boulevard Entertainment, with an eye to creating better roles for women and encouraging Canadian talent to create and produce their own content.
“It’s a fierce industry. It’s very competitive. And what Jovanna and I have been trying to create more opportunities for people like ourselves, for Canadian actors and Canadian talent, writers, producers – everybody – because the stories should be there. The audience is there,” Hobbs, whose Hollywood credits include UnREAL and Make It or Break It, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Projects the Grand Boulevard duo pitched in the Canadian Rockies include Puck Bunnies, a mockumentary about hockey moms, and The Sandwich Generation, a comedy about parenting. Burke, whose TV acting credits include Supernatural and The Flash, said generating better and more authentic leading lady roles for Canadian talent is top of mind.
“We always wanted to tell stories that we didn’t see in scripts. We have a certain value we wanted to place on especially female characters at the center of stories, and we didn’t see that in the scripts we read. So we want to create a community and a base in Vancouver for stories that are female-focused and have underrepresented voices at the center of them,” Burke explained.
In Banff this week, another 25 women with their own production banners participated in the Banff Spark Accelerator for Women in Media program backed by Paramount+ in Canada. That came as the Canadian industry drives forward with efforts to secure elusive gender parity, especially among indigenous and people of color.
Veteran producer Debra Kouri, president of Montreal-based Poutine Studios, recalls in earlier decades when fellow female producers were reluctant to open doors for one another to advance careers. So Kouri is mentoring emerging BIPOC producers, often as an executive producer on their projects, while she pitched her own content slate in Banff.
“While I’ve been in this industry for 25 years, feeling like I’m paying my dues, it’s still hard. It’s still a hustle. And because I didn’t have anybody to open doors for me early in life, I’m really doing my best to push my own projects and try to help emerging producers,” Kouri explained to THR.
Her recent productions include Poutine & Punchlines, a travelogue series hosted by comic Derek Seguin where international stand-up comics indulge in their own late-night, guilty pleasure dishes similar to Poutine, the traditional Quebec post-partying delicacy made of fries, cheese curds and gravy.
In Banff, Kouri pitched The Syrian Detective, a crime drama set in 1920s Montreal (around the time her own family immigrated from Syria and Lebanon to Canada) that centers on a Syrian detective on the city’s police force obsessed with solving the Delorme Affair, a true life Canadian murder case where a Catholic priest was accused of murdering his brother.
Also at the Canadian Rockies-set TV festival, Danielle Sturk, a Franco-Manitoba producer based in Winnipeg, told THR she is leveraging the Spark accelerator to potentially secure financing for her development slate from other French-speaking markets in Europe, including France, Switzerland and Belgium, among other international territories.
That comes as the Canadian industry pivots to global markets and away from a traditional reliance on American financing amid Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada, which includes annexation threats. “The cultural aesthetic in Europe feels much more aligned with how I see the world and how stories should be told,” Sturk told THR.
She added that being part of the Spark accelerator has allowed her to build up a welcome network of 25 fellow women producers for future collaboration. “You’re part of a group, not feeling isolated, but belonging to a sisterhood of sorts, which is really great,” Sturk explained.
Ric Bienstock, another veteran producer and Sparks accelerator participant, told THR she was looking to move her indie banner from hopping from one project to another, and having to continually pause production to raise new financing as part of that grind, to being able to capitalize her company and do multiple projects at the same time with pre-sales and new partners.
“Right now I’m in the middle of producing and directing a film. And it’s very intensive — I’m in an edit suite. So I was thinking how nice it would be to have some infrastructure. I’ve run a company before, but how to build one from the ground up?” she questioned.
The return of the Spark accelerator to Banff this year comes as Canada steps up efforts to support under-represented communities amid calls for greater racial representation in hiring practices on local film and TV sets. But the latest industry data reveals a persistent trend: the Canadian industry has made gains in gender equality, but less so for Black or Indigenous women.
And while the numbers for closing the gender gap in the Canadian industry have improved, there’s still little change in power dynamics in a still male-dominated media space.
Recent female-focused indie movies include Tracey Deer’s Beans, Natalie Krinsky’s The Broken Hearts Gallery and Loretta Todd’s Monkey Beach.
