The Directors Guild of Canada has released its first DGC Director Statistics Report, a comprehensive study on the engagement of Canadian directors by both Canadian and international producers, studios and networks for 2021. The report focuses in on region, gender, production type and those entities commissioning film & television production.

"While the industry still lags behind on achieving gender parity in television movies with only 30% of projects going to women, our numbers show huge progress in closing the gap in feature film and television production,” said DGC National Director Division Chair Zach Lipovsky. “Women are now hired to direct 40% of DGC-signed feature films and 43% of all DGC episodic television shot in Canada."

This report also confirmed serious imbalances in regional activity for Canadian television. While low budget US-based series hire Canadians the majority of the time, high budget series only hire Canadians for 25% of total episodes. Issues of regional imbalance are just as stark domestically. For instance, only 6% of episodes for scripted television series on the CBC and CBC Gem were produced in British Columbia, despite Vancouver being the country’s largest overall production centre for screen-based content.

“It’s disturbing that even a treasured cultural champion like the CBC has more or less ignored the rise of the West Coast film & television industry, despite a crystal-clear mandate to help Canadians share our stories with each other across regions and backgrounds,” Lipovsky added. “We hope that international players working in Canada will take the time get to know to the vast depth of Canadian talent we have and consider those filmmakers for all their productions, not only in areas like TV movies where Canadian hiring is high.”

DGC President Warren P. Sonoda offered the following: “Like our historic DGC Census this past spring, today’s report underlines the work we have ahead of us, building a truly representative industry – and there’s more to come. We will continue to hold ourselves and our industry accountable for telling the diverse range of stories – with a diverse range of storytellers – that Canadians expect and global markets now demand.”