The Minister of Culture and Communications, Mathieu Lacombe, announced Tuesday that his government would offer financial assistance of 5.9 million to the Cinémathèque québécoise. Support which will extend until 2026, and which will be used to carry out the action plan and the mission of the institution.
The mission of the Cinémathèque québécoise consists of acquiring, documenting, saving, restoring and distributing cinematographic, television and more broadly audiovisual works.
According to Isabelle Jalbert, director of administration and buildings at the Cinémathèque, Quebec’s aid will be used in particular for cultural mediation, until the end of 2025, “in order to bring young people to know their heritage”, but it will above all increase the budget dedicated to the conservation, archiving and dissemination of its audiovisual documents.
Ms. Jalbert discusses the numerous films on film received by the Cinémathèque, which must be restored, preserved or digitized. She mentions a project carried out jointly with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on the Toronto painter and director Joyce Wieland, which has just begun, or the restoration of the documentary The Six Seasons of Attikameks, produced in 1983 by Pierre Dinel and Pierre Hivon.
Minister Mathieu Lacombe was pleased to offer the Cinémathèque a little “financial predictability”, which was not the case in the past, at a time when “the needs are great” and where “many filmmakers are getting older.”
The president of the board of directors of the Cinémathèque québécoise, Manon Barbeau, insisted on the accessibility of the institution’s works. She spoke of the difficulty the minister had in finding the documentary At the Level of a Man, which the filmmaker Jean-Claude Labrecque dedicated to Bernard Landry.
Could the Cinémathèque begin digitizing its vast collection of 40,000 works in order to offer them on an online platform? “Possibly yes, but in partnership with others, because we are not equipped for that,” replied Ms. Jalbert. It would be a very large project that would require significant funding, she added, but it is not impossible. »
One of the biggest challenges of the Cinémathèque or Bibliothèque et Archives nationaux du Québec (BAnQ) is to make accessible the many Quebec works – documentaries and fiction – which are not available on any platform. “This is the guiding principle that I gave myself during my mandate, to give all the tools I can to the cultural sector so that it can land in the digital world” insisted Minister Lacombe.
Mathieu Lacombe, however, does not believe that the solution requires a common platform.
“This solution would require seating players who have no interest in working together,” he said. We are better off acting, for example, with the Cinémathèque, with BAnQ, or by reviewing the financing model for the audiovisual sector, as I announced last week with the creation of a committee of experts [chaired by Monique Simard and Philippe Lamarre], to have an ecosystem that holds together and is adapted to digital reality. »
