The view from out West: embeddedness, inter-personal relations and the development of an indigenous film industry in Vancouver

Abstract

This paper considers the development of a particular cultural industry, the indigenous film and television production sector, in a specific locality, Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada). Vancouver’s film and television industry exhibits a high level of dependency on the location shooting of US funded productions, a relatively mobile form of foreign investment capital. As such, the development of locally developed and funded projects is crucial to the long-term sustainability of the industry. The key facilitators of growth in the indigenous sector are a small group of independent producers that are attempting to develop their own projects within a whole series of constraints apparently operating at the local, national and international levels. At the international level, they are situated within a North American cultural industry where the funding, production, distribution and exhibition of projects is dominated by US multinationals. At the national level, both government funding schemes and broadcaster purchasing patterns favour the larger production companies of central Canada. At the local level, producers have to compete with the demands of US productions for crew, locations and equipment. I frame my analysis within notions of the embeddedness or embodiment of social and economic relations, and suggest that the material realities of processes operating at the three inter-linked scales, are effectively embodied in a small group of individual producers and their inter-personal networks.