Ballinran Entertainment looking to launch film fund to support local film and television industry

Director Kiera Loughran speaks before the Stratford premiere of Exclusion: Beyond the Silence, a film produced by Stratford's Ballinran Entertainment, at the Tom Patterson Theatre Dec. 5. The local production company and its founder, Craig Thompson (pictured far left), holds this film up as an example of the type of film that can be made in partnership with the creative talent that already exists in the Festival City.

To help put the resources and financing in place to support a made-in-Stratford film and television industry, and stimulate the development of new film projects, local production company Ballinran Entertainment is looking to establish a dedicated film fund.

The Ballinran Film Fund is not a production fund, nor is it a fund to subsidize productions that wish to use Stratford as a backdrop for location shooting. It’s a fund to support the growth of a homegrown content-production industry.

“The whole screen industry is undergoing this generational shift now,” Ballinran Entertainment president and executive producer Craig Thompson said. “As streaming is taking over, borders are vanishing and content is becoming more of a global industry. Canadian broadcasters are, themselves, going through transformation because of the shift to streaming, and the new broadcasting act called Bill C11 is meant to bring all content that’s delivered on screen via the internet or by broadcasting under one funding umbrella.

“Production in Canada is largely subsidized or incentivised by the government, so we get tax credits from the federal and provincial governments, we get money from the Canada Media Fund and industry regulated funds – as much as 60-70 per cent of our budgets come from government-subsidized funds. The challenge in our industry is international competition. One of the barriers to keep Canada’s content industry as strong as it should be is in the area of development of new ideas. The production-funding model itself is intact, but the challenge is where does the money come from for new projects that will have an international appeal?”

The idea for the film fund, Thompson continued, is to leverage the valuable, creative assets that already exist in Stratford to create a homegrown industry that will create and deliver content locally.

Once fully operational, the fund will provide development advances to projects with demonstrated market potential, with those advances converted to equity in any project that goes into production. Greenlit productions can also tap into the fund to benefit from interim finance tax credits from the federal and Ontario governments, a foundational financing incentive in the screen industry in many jurisdictions.

“One way of the fund becoming sustainable and growing is to earn interest on the interim financing that is granted to productions that go ahead,” Thompson said. “ … Any money that’s invested in projects that have a potential for success, the fund will be an equity partner in those projects and will be able to recoup that investment once the project goes commercial.”

Bringing additional value to the initiative, Ballinran will be contributing its production resources, market knowledge and distribution expertise as it builds out this fund. To develop the Ballinran Film Fund, Thompson said he needs to garner interest from those passionate about the industry, both from an investment side and from the creative side.

“You reach out to people passionate about the idea and then you pair investors with the fund, and then we start offering money to creatives in the community and say we can help you reach domestic and international markets,” Thompson said. “Ballinran is contributing a lot to this project. We’re contributing our marketing expertise, our financing expertise and our connections, as well as our facilities and resources, but there’s only so many things we can do with the resources we have available. We need a team Stratford approach to create a content machine, a content studio in Stratford.”

For more information and to learn more about the Ballinran Film Fund, visit drive.google.com/file/d/12uQ0y7-hulP5_7P2sogtlZP97cEe31oy/view or contact Ballinran Entertainment at action@ballinran.com.