Phases

Rubedo's work runs in four phases. They overlap in practice, and none of them waits for another to finish, but each depends on the visibility the earlier ones create. Laying them out in order is the clearest way to explain what this project is for.

Phase 1: Activate the network

Canada holds co-production treaties with 57 countries. Phase 1 puts that network to work in two directions at once. Corridors that have never carried a project need their first one, and corridors already in use can carry more ambitious work than they currently do. The region pages supply the research this phase requires: the financial architecture, production context, and starting points for every treaty territory, documented thoroughly enough to act on. Discourses is the production arm, a slate of documentaries, one per treaty territory, designed to be worth watching in their own right. This is the current work.

Phase 2: The heritage industry

Phase 2 concerns how the industry itself is valued. A country's screen production earns more than its box office number. It moves tourism, carries language and culture abroad, keeps creative and technical talent at home, and shapes how a nation is seen and how it sees itself. Most of that return never appears in the accounting, so the industry gets treated as entertainment rather than as infrastructure. Phase 2 is the work of making the full return legible, in Canada and in partner territories alike, until domestic film and television production holds the standing of a headline heritage industry.

Phase 3: The rail lines

Every co-production leaves relationships behind it: producers who have worked together, financiers who have moved money across a border, institutions that have signed off, officials who have said yes. Those relationships are general-purpose once they exist. Phase 3 runs broader collaboration along them, extending the corridors that film opened into trade, research, investment, and the other bilateral frameworks documented on each region page. Canada was assembled along rail lines, and the principle is the same: infrastructure built for one kind of cargo will carry others.

Phase 4: The hub between three oceans

Phase 4 is the horizon. Canada borders the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Arctic. It holds one of the largest networks of bilateral agreements in the world, and its population is drawn from nearly everywhere on earth. A country with those endowments, and with a demonstrated practice of building things jointly with partners, is positioned to become the natural hub for physical, digital, and creative trade among the regions it connects. The first three phases are how that position gets earned rather than claimed.

Phase 1 is underway. If you have a connection to one of the 57 territories, the regions are the place to start.