The Cargo Cult of the Nova Scotia Screen Industry

Why Nova Scotia keeps mistaking the symbols of success for the real thing

"Hope is not a plan."

This is a difficult conversation. Over the last year, the numbers from the CMPA, Playback, and the trades all tell the same story: a major contraction in Canada’s legacy Screen Industries. Production volumes are down, financing is tighter, and key buyers have retreated or pivoted. The ‘system’—if we can still call it that—is not just stressed. It’s restructuring, and not in ways that serve most creators, producers, or regions outside the central hubs.

So while I respect the impulse to stay hopeful and trust that things will work themselves out, I believe we owe it to ourselves—and to the next generation—to be more honest and more ambitious.

The industry we grew up in is not coming back in the same form. And that's not a tragedy. It's an opportunity. But only if we stop, take stock, and begin again—not with tweaks and patches, but with a true reset: new financing models, new incentives tailored to ownership and IP creation, and a shift away from being merely service providers toward being content owners and exporters. It means, unfortunately, starting over in a modest way.

This isn't about abandoning the past. It's about learning from it—and having the courage to build something better.

This week in my essay on the screen industry in Nova Scotia, I used the metaphor of the Cargo Cult, but didn’t spend any time exploring that reference. I thought it would be worthwhile and interesting for readers to follow up.

I do appreciate that these are difficult conversations and could easily be read as zero-sum, where some people and segments of the industry might be considered less important for others to get more attention. This is not the case. Arts funding and service production infrastructure would be the principal beneficiaries of more and better domestically owned for-profit production. It is the engine under the hood of every example you look at of a successful industry. In Nova Scotian terms, it is the rising tide that floats all boats.

We don’t have a screen industry. We have a cargo cult. Festivals, film gear, service gigs, and soundstages are not an industry, even Screen Nova Scotia itself — an industry group funded by the very people we intend to lobby, because we don’t have the money to finance our own lobby group. They’re the symbols of an industry. And we've spent the better part of a decade mistaking the symbol for the thing symbolized, while the real work of IP ownership, capital formation, and profit-making intention gets afterthought.

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What is a Cargo Cult?

After the Second World War, something strange unfolded on the islands of Melanesia in the Southwest Pacific. Allied forces had come and gone, bringing with them planes full of cargo—medicine, food, radios, tents, tools, and other wonders.

When the war ended, the planes stopped coming. But some islanders, believing that these material blessings had been the result of ritual, started re-creating the conditions of the airbases: bamboo airstrips, handmade radios, men waving flags, even full mock control towers and planes. They marched in formation, lit signal fires, and waited for the much-coveted Cargo to return.

These were called cargo cults—well-intentioned but hollow imitations of powerful systems, based on a misunderstanding of what really made them work.

The history of Cargo Cults as a religion in the South West Pacific is fascinating – deeper, more long lasting, and more complex than is generally imagined. And more poignant and on point here.

Stemming directly from religious teaching of equality, and its resulting sense of injustice, is what is generally known as ‘Vailala Madness’, or ‘Cargo Cult’. . . . A native, infected with the disorder, states that a great number of ships loaded with ‘cargo’ had been sent by the ancestor of the native for the benefit of the natives of a particular village or area. But the white man, being very cunning, knows how to intercept these ships and takes the ‘cargo’ for his own use. . . By his very nature the New Guinea native is peculiarly susceptible to these ‘cults’

— Norris Mervyn Bird, Pacific Islands Monthly, 1945

The idea endures. John Frum (like, “I’m John From…) is a figure associated with cargo cults on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. This God is often depicted as an American World War II serviceman who will bring wealth and prosperity to the people if they follow him. In a 1960 BBC documentary, British broadcaster David Attenborough asked the locals what Frum looked like and was told, "'E look like you. 'E got white face. 'E tall man. 'E live 'long South America."

Vanuatu often ranks near the top of the Happy Planet Index, which measures well-being and environmental sustainability rather than GDP. For scuba divers, it’s the site of mountains of equipment the US military dumped in the sea after WWII.

In the 1990s, there were still reportedly over 5,000 members of the John Frum movement.

Now, flash-forward to the present-day Nova Scotia screen industry.

In Nova Scotia, we’ve built our own version of a cargo cult. Instead of runways, we’ve imagined the visible symbols of a film industry: soundstages, galas, grant programs, equipment rental shops, red carpets, and Instagrammable awards ceremonies. We’ve learned the language. We wear the uniforms. We wave the flags.

But the cargo isn’t coming. And we don’t ask why. We should.

Here’s the hard truth: infrastructure without industry is just an expensive stage set. A soundstage doesn’t create a production economy any more than a fake runway summons planes. Festivals don’t substitute for sustainable markets. Cameras don’t make creators. We’ve mastered the form—but we’re missing the function.

Real industry is built on ownership. On repeat customers. On a discerning domestic market. On stories and companies and content that originate here, not just pass through. Until we focus on developing creators, companies, and IP that belong to Nova Scotians—and that the world wants to see—we're still out there waving our flags on a quiet beach, hoping the planes come back.

It’s time to stop copying the symbols of success and start building the systems that create it. That work is done with capital. We have everything else we need already.

We’re confusing the symbol for the thing symbolized. A soundstage isn’t an industry. A festival isn’t an industry. Even a job isn’t an industry. Those are outcomes—not origins.

A real screen industry is not built on copycat infrastructure or one-off gigs. It’s built on three things:

• Capital to fund production and expansion

• Ownership of the intellectual property and the companies that make it

• Profit-making intention, meaning a strategy to grow revenue, reinvest, and build sustainable enterprises that last beyond one grant cycle or one passionate founder

What we’ve built instead is a series of rituals. We hope that if we look the part, the benefits will arrive. But cargo doesn’t fall from the sky anymore. It follows business plans, not signal fires.

To truly grow a screen industry in Nova Scotia, we need to stop worshipping and celebrating the symbols of success and start doing the hard work of creating it. That means investing in local for-profit, export-oriented creators and companies who own their work. It means supporting vertical integration—writers, producers, studios, financiers, and distributors who are connected and committed to this place. It means treating our industry like a business, not a recurring miracle.

We’ve spent a decade trying to bring the planes back.

It’s time to build our own.

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SIDEBAR:

Maybe the worst cargo cult move in regional entertainment industries is the use of bureaucratic arts funding decision models as stand-ins for the market. We see it in both music and screen industry funding, and the results are painful — for everyone involved.

Stop Picking Winners

More than anything else, people whose jobs do not depend on the commercial success of a film or television project should not—cannot—be the ones picking winners in competitive funding situations. That’s the job of buyers: commissioning editors, distributors, and platforms with money, reputations, careers, and futures on the line.

They succeed or fail based on the choices they make. That’s the only system that works.

When bureaucrats, consultants, or funding bodies insulated from market consequences are tasked with choosing what gets made, it’s not just inefficient—it’s destructive. They’re not investing. They’re guessing. At best, they’re applying soft policy logic to hard commercial questions. At worst, they’re gambling with public money based on personal taste, internal politics, or buzzwords of the moment. This is especially true at the early stages of career and project development.

This is how you get a dead zone: projects with budgets but no buyers, shows that screen once and vanish, and creators who think success is about writing better grants instead of better pitches.

Arts funding—real arts funding—is a different thing entirely. It has broader goals: cultural expression, representation, experimentation, and preservation. It serves a social purpose, not a market one. That's why "pick a winner" models make sense there, guided by policy objectives and peer review.

But commercial film and television—projects meant to survive in the open market—cannot be judged by those same metrics or the same people. When they are, they fail 100% of the time. They waste money, they confuse young creators, and they blur the line between art and commerce in a way that serves no one.

Even very small amounts of funding can encourage behavior that does not meet the market, and even more so it can discourage people who are thinking outside the box of policy parameters where real creativity happens.

We need to stop pretending this is working.

Let buyers buy. Let audiences decide. And if we want a real screen industry, we have to respect what the word means. We can do this. But it requires a real restructuring of our models to create a real domestic market that can succeed in the media landscape to come.

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In other news this week I’m proud that the CMPA, the Canadian Media Producers Association, the national body of professional Canadian Producers and production companies, signed on with a global list of producers’ associations to recognize the threat to both the commercial and cultural aspects of digital trade brought on by what the industry media are calling the TTT (Trump Tariff Threat).

https://cmpa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/A-Global-Declaration-for-Artistic-Freedom-Cultural-Diversity-Final.pdf

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