As Creatives Empowered brings an Alberta delegation to the inaugural TIFF: The Market, three creators are looking beyond visibility toward financing, partnerships and the relationships that turn projects into careers.
By Kimberley Dooshima Jev
There is no shortage of people trying to get noticed at the Toronto International Film Festival. For a group of Alberta creators attending the inaugural TIFF: The Market, being seen is only the beginning.
Running September 10 to 16 alongside the Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF: The Market brings producers, buyers, distributors, funders, sales agents and creators into a new international marketplace built around the business of screen content.
Creatives Empowered, an Alberta non-profit dedicated to advancing the careers of IBPOC artists and creatives, has brought a delegation from the province into that environment.
The organization sees the opportunity as a way to address a familiar problem for Alberta creators: talent exists here. Access to the people who can finance, develop, buy and distribute that talent is harder to come by.
“As Alberta’s first non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the careers of IBPOC artists and creatives, now with over 300 members and counting, we were thrilled to collaborate with TIFF on their inaugural market,” Creatives Empowered founder and executive and artistic director Shivani Saini told Afros in tha City.
For Saini, getting Alberta creators into the room is significant. What happens after they enter it matters more.
She describes this year’s representation as “certainly unprecedented,” but says meaningful success would include relationships that continue beyond the Market, professional development that strengthens delegates’ companies and intellectual property, connections to diaspora audiences and, eventually, development and production deals.
Three delegates spoke with Afros in tha City before heading to Toronto about what that next step could look like.
The conversation has to continue
Sandra Bueckert — creator of Under the Skin
Sandra Bueckert is taking Under the Skin, a one-hour drama inspired by the world she has known through 37 years as a personal trainer and fitness entrepreneur in Calgary.
Its premise places a personal-training studio at the centre of people’s private lives. The trainer knows everybody’s secrets until she discovers she may not know her own husband.
Bueckert is not going to TIFF simply looking for attention around the project.
She wants the right producer, broadcaster or development partner to see what the story could become and keep talking to her after Toronto.
“For me, the biggest barrier has been access,” she says.
Bueckert is a 60-year-old Black Jamaican Canadian woman who entered television after building a career in another industry. She did not begin with a network of producers, broadcasters or executives already opening doors.
“The talent is already here in Alberta,” she says. “What we need are stronger pathways connecting that talent to the people who can develop, finance, buy and distribute our work.”
That makes her definition of success at TIFF remarkably practical. “I want to come home with people expecting to hear from me.”
A request for the pilot would count. So would a follow-up meeting, an introduction to a producer or the beginning of a creative partnership. Visibility matters. For Bueckert, it only becomes useful when it leads somewhere.
Tobit Luyeye Lemba — actor, independent producer, director and acting coach.
Getting Alberta onto the radar
Tobit Luyeye Lemba arrived at his first TIFF: The Market with four projects in the concept stage: two podcasts, a short film and a documentary.
His best-case outcome is straightforward. He wants one of those ideas to attract the financing needed to move forward. Lemba, an actor, independent producer, director and acting coach, sees Alberta’s challenge partly as one of geography and industry scale.
“Alberta creators have so much talent, and that’s one of the pain points: we are simply not on the radar as much as other provinces,” he says.
There have been periods in his acting career when auditions slowed because there were not enough projects being produced locally. He also sees another gap: artists need to understand the business around their work.
Financing, partnerships and the structure of the screen industry can feel separate from the creative process, particularly for people who entered the field to make art. Lemba argues that the two cannot be separated so easily. Knowing how the business works affects whether a project can move beyond an idea.
At TIFF, he is looking for meetings, contacts, financing conversations and creative partnerships. He also wants time with senior industry decision-makers who can help him understand what major platforms are looking for and how creators outside Canada’s largest production centres get onto their radar.
Flordeliza Dayrit — co-founder and director of Milo Productions Inc.; director of Time Hoppers
Proving the audience exists
Flordeliza Dayrit comes to the question of access from another position. The Edmonton-based co-founder and director of Milo Productions Inc. already has evidence that culturally specific storytelling can travel.
Dayrit directed Time Hoppers, an animated time-travel adventure following four children whose journey takes them along the historic Silk Road and into stories connected to the history of science. Now, her company is bringing its next feature film in development to TIFF.
She is looking for financing, production, distribution and strategic partners, particularly people who understand that a story can come from a specific community without being limited to that community.
The larger obstacle, she says, is what happens after creators prove audiences want their work.
For growing production companies, the industry can create a circular problem. Access to certain opportunities may depend on already having financing relationships, distribution commitments, infrastructure or an established track record. Yet emerging companies often need those opportunities in order to build those things in the first place.
Dayrit argues that the next stage for underrepresented creators cannot only be about providing another grant or another entry-level program. There needs to be a clearer route from emerging creator to sustainable production company.
For Alberta producers, distance from the country’s largest production centres can also mean fewer informal opportunities to build relationships with financiers, distributors, co-producers and mentors. Talent is not restricted by geography. Industry access often is.
Beyond being invited into the room
That distinction sits at the centre of the Creatives Empowered delegation.
Getting an Alberta creator to Toronto is one form of access. Creating the conditions for that creator to return home with a meeting, a financing lead, a distribution conversation or a new partner is another. Saini says Creatives Empowered intends to continue creating barrier-free routes into opportunities like TIFF: The Market.
The measure of whether those opportunities work may not be clear by the time the festival ends. Deals take time. Relationships develop. Projects move slowly.
Still, the delegates themselves are clear about what they are asking the industry to recognize. Alberta already has creators. It already has stories. It already has people building audiences and developing projects.
The question is whether the pathways between that work and the people with the power to move it forward can become easier to cross.