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.
Posted at 1:32 p.m.
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 Above all, it will increase the budget devoted to the conservation, archiving and dissemination of its audiovisual documents.
Mme Jalbert mentions 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 Attikameksproduced 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 old.”
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 eye levelwhich the filmmaker Jean-Claude Labrecque dedicated to Bernard Landry.
“Landing in the digital world”
Could the Cinémathèque begin digitizing its vast collection of 40,000 works in order to offer them on an online platform? “Eventually, yes, but in partnership with others, because we are not equipped for that,” replied Mme Jalbert. This would be a very large project that would require significant funding, 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 numerous Quebec works – documentaries and fiction – which are not offered on any platform (apart from the Éléphant project). “This is the guiding principle that I gave myself during my mandate, to give all the tools that 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. It is better to act, for example, with the Cinémathèque, with BAnQ, or by reviewing the financing model of the audiovisual sector, as I announced last week with the creation of a committee of experts [présidé par Monique Simard et Philippe Lamarre], to have an ecosystem that holds together and is adapted to digital reality. »
