During these challenging times, the Bell Fund remains open for business for you. We continue to work remotely and are available to you by phone and email. We understand that this a very challenging time for our friends and colleagues in the Industry and we will do our part to address your concerns as quickly as we can. In the coming days we plan on announcing a virtual information session. Our Deputy Directors, Suzanne Lacey and Chantal Cote will be available to answer your questions. Please, also use our social feeds and website to keep up to date.
Keep reading for some important updates
Update on Deadlines
TV Selective – deadline remains on April 6th. The portal is open now and we encourage you to upload your application as soon as possible. Given the load on everyone’s networks, we cannot guarantee that there won’t be challenges with the platform if everyone waits until the 6th to apply.
You can access the guidelines here
MPF TV Envelope – deadline remains the same. The portal is open to receive applications.
Short-Form Digital Series –Change in Deadline. As a reminder we are accepting both fiction and non-fiction projects to apply to each deadline in 2020. This allows Producers two opportunities to make an application to the Fund. On March 27th the Fund announced that we were postponing the deadline until April 27th. Today, given the ongoing impact of Covid-19 we have decided it is important to give Producers more time to deal with key deliverables, including but not limited to, the 2 minute trailer, confirming the 10% cash contribution from a third party, and submitting in advance the Fund’s Pre Approval form for all non-broadcaster digital platforms ( to be completed by the channel or platform). The health and safety of stakeholders and their teams remain our first priority. Therefore we are going to extend the deadline further so that Producers have from April 27th to June 15th to complete and upload the application and all its components. As always, your priority should be to follow all the Provincial and Federal health protocols first.
For those Producers that have all their application components ready to go, we encourage you to upload your application on April 27th or as soon as possible. Please don’t wait until the last minute because as we said above, we cannot guarantee that their won’t be challenges given the demand on the portal. Secondly, this deadline remains a selective and juried deadline and we want to move these applications to Board approval as quickly as possible. That means as applications are uploaded we will start the eligibility phase immediately . This will allow a quicker turnaround when the deadline closes on June 15th.To be clear, this is not a first come first served deadline.
There will continue to be a Fall deadline but it will be delayed until October 19th.
We will continue to monitor the situation and keep you updated.
Project Management
It’s business as usual in terms of contract deliverables, reporting and issuing of cheques. Producers have reached out to us about postponements and scope changes as a result of the current situation. This is to be expected and we will continue to be as flexible as possible. We want Producers to be successful.
Industry Development
It’s business as usual in terms of working with our partners to support the delivery of industry events across the Country. However, there may be delays given our first priority must be our deadlines for Producers.
Please stay healthy and safe,
The Bell Fund Team