TORONTO – Recognizing that the digital transformation is changing fundamentally how audiences consume and interact with audiovisual media, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) announced a new five-year Strategic Plan at the Hot Docs festival on Monday night.
“In a digital era, the need for the NFB as Canada’s public producer and distributor is more essential than ever to undertake the kinds of risks that an audiovisual industry in constant state of change and turmoil cannot afford to take,” the NFB states in its Strategic Plan (2008-2013).
The NFB said key aspects of its mandate include supporting creators, fostering imagination and socially engaged works in all forms of technology, and making the results accessible to all Canadians.
Five strategic objectives have been outlined in the NFB’s new Strategic Plan. The first goal is to achieve creative leadership and programming excellence that “will make the NFB the key reference point globally for innovation and creation in social issue documentary, community-engaged media, alternative drama and auteur animation for and across all platforms.”
Secondly, the NFB plans to address issues of accessibility and citizen engagement that “will make the NFB readily and widely accessible to Canadian and international audiences on platforms of the day and that will promote public, socially inclusive discourse.”
The NFB’s third objective will focus on digital transformation that “will serve as a foundation to enable NFB to deliver on its mandate into the future in programming, distribution, new business development, outreach and preservation of its audiovisual heritage.”
The fourth and fifth objectives of the NFB’s Strategic Plan will address issues of organizational renewal and establishing firm financing, respectively.
“The NFB is at its best when it is true to its primary public mandate, when it functions as a creative laboratory for the audiovisual sector, when it pushes limits and takes risks. That is precisely the role of a public producer and distributor. It is precisely the NFB’s role and it is the role we must continue to foster and strengthen,” said NFB Chairperson Tom Perlmutter.
The NFB’s new Strategic Plan can be accessed at www.nfb.ca/strategic-plan.
