film explores. Telefilm, a Canadian film and television financing agency, had a generous reward program for producers of successful theatrical films. Until 2004, those films were only dramas. The Corporation changed that. For the first time, a documentary’s box office gross qualified it for a “performance envelope” – a kind of exclusive reserve fund for the top 15% of producers whose films gross over $1m. A total of $2.38m was awarded to Achbar's company, Invisible Hand Productions Inc, which he put into ten Canadian feature documentaries, five in development and five in production, which helped lock in $270,000 of development financing and a further $5.85m of production financing for those productions. The completed, theatrically-released productions which benefited from this funding are Velcrow Ripper's Fierce Light, When Spirit Meets Action; Denis Delestrac's Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space, Kevin McMahon's Waterlife, Frederick Gertten's Bananas: Poison in a Banana Republic; Mathieu Roy's and Harold Crooks' Surviving Progress; and Oliver Hockenhull's Neurons to Nirvana: Understanding Psychedelic Medicine. As an EP, Achbar is advising, and helping, in a small way, to finance four feature documentaries: Asher Penn is making a film about Gabor Mate, renowned trauma doctor and therapist. Holly McGowan is making Calling All People a film (5 years in progress) about TemPeSt Grace Gale, a 25 year old singer, activist, poet, artist, marionette maker, who was murdered on Hornby Island. Jen Muranetz is making Standing With The Ancients, a film about the standoff happening now between environmental activist protesters and police at Fairy Creek. And Bart Simpson’s (yes that's his real name, and he had it first) film on Mad Magazine founding editor Harvey Kurtzman. Achbar helped shoot, and is an EP on DOSED2-The Trip Of A Lifetime Achbar continues his film career as an executive producer of feature documentary films. He has contributed his videography skills to two animal rights videos, Penny's Story and Meat The Victims: Excelsior Farms. Achbar is co-founder, with Sarah Butterfield, of Speakables, a stealthy Vancouver technology startup which designs novel offline speech-to-text devices to assist the deaf and hard of hearing. Selected films Director and Producer: Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (with Peter Wintonick) (1992) Two Brides And A Scalpel: Diary of a Lesbian Marriage (1999) The Corporation (2003) Executive Producer: Blue Gold: World Water Wars, directed by Sam Bozzo (2008) Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action, directed by Velcrow Ripper (2008) Pax