***banff Birthday Fare
Tuesday, June 8 1999
Published on AllBusiness.com
Banff Birthday/The Rocky Mountain TV forum celebrates 20 years of growth.
By Etan Vlessing
TORONTO -- This year the Banff TV Festival is celebrating 20 years of hosting top international TV executives and creators -- in a Canadian Rocky Mountain retreat -- to discuss and debate their craft and industry. Not coincidentally, the festival's 20th birthday comes as the Canadian TV industry celebrates two decades of parallel growth and success.
The reputation of Canadian independent producers as the second-largest exporters of TV programming internationally after Hollywood has added luster to the Banff event. "We could not have been taken as seriously as we are if we did not have the (Canadian production) industry to back us up," says Pat Ferns, festival CEO.
The Banff TV Festival got its start when the Alberta provincial government decided to sponsor a film festival to run alongside the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. Ferns recalls the inaugural 1979 Banff festival as a critical success but a financial failure. So in its second year, festival organizers moved the event to Banff -- an exotic town nestled in the picturesque Rocky Mountains alongside towering peaks and rushing waters -- and converted it into a TV festival, to avoid confusion with feature-film festivals in Toronto and Montreal.
In its early years, the Banff TV Festival remained modest -- fewer than 100 delegates and 200 program entries turned out in 1979, a far cry from the 1,744 delegates and 989 programs from 40 countries the festival received last year.
Early on, the event centered around its juried competition, the Banff Rockie Awards. Reflecting the festival's international bent, the Rockie Awards embraced a number of program genres, and all countries were considered eligible to compete, in contrast to the international Emmys where U.S. programming is not included.
"While certainly richer countries, like the U.S., Canada and the U.K., do well, the nominations are in fact spread around a lot of countries. That's not done politically. That's just how it turns out," Ferns insists.
Jerry Ezekiel, festival senior vp and an original organizer of the event, says he recognized from the beginning that the Rockie Awards would have to judge international programming and that the competition would be valuable to Canadian producers and broadcasters because the awards were international.
"They (U.S. networks) gave us a great deal of credibility with the material they lent us for the competition from year one," Ezekiel recalls.
Even so, Werner Kohn, longtime head of program
By Etan Vlessing
TORONTO -- This year the Banff TV Festival is celebrating 20 years of hosting top international TV executives and creators -- in a Canadian Rocky Mountain retreat -- to discuss and debate their craft and industry. Not coincidentally, the festival's 20th birthday comes as the Canadian TV industry celebrates two decades of parallel growth and success.
The reputation of Canadian independent producers as the second-largest exporters of TV programming internationally after Hollywood has added luster to the Banff event. "We could not have been taken as seriously as we are if we did not have the (Canadian production) industry to back us up," says Pat Ferns, festival CEO.
The Banff TV Festival got its start when the Alberta provincial government decided to sponsor a film festival to run alongside the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. Ferns recalls the inaugural 1979 Banff festival as a critical success but a financial failure. So in its second year, festival organizers moved the event to Banff -- an exotic town nestled in the picturesque Rocky Mountains alongside towering peaks and rushing waters -- and converted it into a TV festival, to avoid confusion with feature-film festivals in Toronto and Montreal.
In its early years, the Banff TV Festival remained modest -- fewer than 100 delegates and 200 program entries turned out in 1979, a far cry from the 1,744 delegates and 989 programs from 40 countries the festival received last year.
Early on, the event centered around its juried competition, the Banff Rockie Awards. Reflecting the festival's international bent, the Rockie Awards embraced a number of program genres, and all countries were considered eligible to compete, in contrast to the international Emmys where U.S. programming is not included.
"While certainly richer countries, like the U.S., Canada and the U.K., do well, the nominations are in fact spread around a lot of countries. That's not done politically. That's just how it turns out," Ferns insists.
Jerry Ezekiel, festival senior vp and an original organizer of the event, says he recognized from the beginning that the Rockie Awards would have to judge international programming and that the competition would be valuable to Canadian producers and broadcasters because the awards were international.
"They (U.S. networks) gave us a great deal of credibility with the material they lent us for the competition from year one," Ezekiel recalls.
Even so, Werner Kohn, longtime head of program
