MUMBAI: The Banff World Television Festival wil examine the far-reaching scope of news and documentary programming. The event takes place in June 2005 in Banff, Canada.
Best-selling author and highly-decorated Canadian Forces Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire will deliver the keynote address. He wrote an account of his experiences during the Rwandan genocide in Shake Hands With The Devil, The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
This paved the way for Peter Raymont's documentary Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire. The session is being sponsored by CBC/Radio-Canada
Complementing Dallaire's address is an intimate dialogue with Raymont. This will explore Raymont's 34-year career that has yielded over 100 documentaries. He has won 35 international awards and his films have been broadcast on numerous television networks around the world. In fact, his up-coming project Killer Cure was born at the Banff World Television Festival. In 2002, Raymont won a pitching contest for this project and the development blossomed from there.
Banff World Television Festival, event CEO Robert Montgomery said,"As the world's leading event for television content creators, Banff has an obligation to inform and enlighten the producers, broadcasters, financiers, buyers and government agencies that come from around the world to participate in our conference sessions. Lieutenant-General Dallaire serves as an inspiration - persevering against seemingly insurmountable challenges.
" He encourages those in a position of influence, such as our delegates, to give voice to the dilemmas and injustice that impede our success on a very human scale. Similarly, Peter Raymont is testament to the fact that film and television are powerful mediums that wield tremendous impact and offer unparalleled insight into a broad range of issues and events."
Banff World Television Festival will also offer a full slate of sessions on the issues that are central to those working in international co-production and genres. "The goal of this event is to offer business opportunities to delegates that will help them successfully navigate their way through to the future of television as it develops," Montgomery said.
Conference sessions will address successful collaborations and business models for co-financing, funding and marketing television programming as well as emerging genres and burgeoning technologies such as HDTV. There will also be major sessions around treaty and international co-production issues across genres, with the goal of finding solutions to open more doors on co-production among treaty and non-treaty partners. Case studies and master sessions will also examine the anatomy of recent successful co-production projects.
Banff will continue its tradition of facilitating new business opportunities with the continuation of its famous pitching competitions: Market Simulation, New Players Pitch, iPitch for interactive projects and the world's most lucrative pitch - CTV Canadian Documart. These competitions offer producers the opportunity to pitch their hot new ideas to a distinguished group of international broadcasters and decision-makers. Sessions also encourage broadcasters to share programming needs as well as discuss programming trends and emerging technologies with producers from around the world.
