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8 mbiz | may 2015 n orthern Lights! Camera! Action! That could be the command given by a movie or television director on a shoot in Churchill. And that phrase, or something like it, has been uttered on two different productions in just the last year. Movie-making is big business in Manitoba, and having a production company in your community can be an economic mini-boom. Carole Vivier, Manitoba Film & Music's CEO & film commissioner, heads up one of the organizations that invests in, and wants to see, as many of those mini-booms happen as possible. "The thing that doesn't get communicated enough is that when productions are here, 90% of the people working on those productions are Manitobans that live and work here," says Vivier. Merit Motion Pictures (MMP) is one of the top producers of blue- chip science documentaries in Canada, specializing in natural history and current affairs. Merit Jensen Carr, MMP's executive producer and president, just had a crew wrap a major project that tracks the migration of 1,000 polar bears through Churchill. "Polar Bear Town is a documentary series that we're doing for Outdoor Life Network (OLN) and Smithsonian Channel in the U.S. and Earth Touch internationally," she says. That international connection is fostered significantly with provincial funding through tax incentives, something Jensen Carr says is key to pitching a project outside of Canada. "Our polar bear project is a really good example of that," she says. "We took the provincial tax credit and went into the States and found an international partner, and then we came back and found our Canadian partner." She says the tax credits are the way to ensure Manitoba's indigenous film industry remains stable and continues to thrive. "I think that the provincial government really gets that," she says. Kim Todd, founder, president and executive producer at Original Pictures, says Manitoba has many strengths as a production centre. "Manitoba has great incentives, talented crews and cast, a wide variety of locations and very helpful and supportive governments at the provincial and civic levels," says Todd. "Our feature film Midnight Sun, for example, which is an international production, had a budget that was at the top of the range for Canadian movies." n o r m a n o r m a n cloSeup on churchill Filmmakers Focus on manitoba's north By Wendy King

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