Canada’s film and television industry is mourning the death of an old friend.

After 29 years in operation, the Canadian Screen and Training Centre (CSTC) has fallen victim to federal funding cuts to national film schools. With no life support, the centre—which drew scores of talented budding filmmakers to training offered in Ottawa and across the country—will officially roll its credits on April 1st.

“I’ve been on a soapbox for over 35 years talking about how we Canadians, like every country, should tell our own stories,” CSTC founder Tom Shoebridge said. “What I was trying to do was get the rest of Canada into that model of doing small important films about us which would communicate around the world.”

“That vision infused all of our courses,” he says. “Now that’s going to be lost.”

The CSTC was born in one of those eureka moments for Shoebridge back in 1981. He started small, offering five courses in French and English to fill what he saw as a gap in the opportunities for budding filmmakers to receive professional training outside the National Film Board and the CBC. After 12 years the centre became a not-for-profit organization and began offering classes in all ten provinces.

All told, some 7000 students participated in the centre’s programs over the years.

Shoebridge’s main objective with his programming was to force the creative executives on a given project—the writers, directors, producers and actors—to realize that they were a collaborative group, not creative islands.

“I wasn’t interested in the technical, partly because there are lots of places for that and I really felt that if I had any energy I was going to spend it forcing those people to get together,” Shoebridge says. “Many places keep those people separate or offer one workshop here and another later, so that has been some of what we feel is our strength.”

At the centre’s renowned filmmaking boot camp, the Summer Institute of Film and Television (SIFT), students spent a week cozying up, cross-pollinating ideas and inspirations. Out of this came many of the artistic collaborations that now form the backbone of the Canada’s burgeoning film and television industry.

“You just met people and traded information,” says Lynn Tarzwell, whose first course in 1994 helped her land a role as coordinator of the screenwriting program at Algonquin College.

“It’s really important that we keep the connections going that have been built up through SIFT,” she says. “The closure is shameful because of the amount of business that SIFT brought in to town and the credibility it gave us; that we weren’t just this horrible back-water, moose’s-armpit place, but a viable industry.”

Viable indeed. Shoebridge’s calculates that SIFT graduates and teachers have collectively produced more than $400 million worth of productions.

Distinguished staff and alumni include the late Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mounrtain), Burt Metcalfe (M*A*S*H), Denise Robert (The Barbarian Invasions), and Lixin Fan (Last Train Home).

Many appreciated how CSTC allowed students to get up close and personal with the inspirational staff.

“I took dramatic scriptwriting with Sid Fields who is a world-renowned scriptwriting guru,” says Mary Mackay-Smith, who went on to create the hit children’s television program, The Mysteries of Alfred Hedgehog. “There he was in my class, and for a very small fee I could chat with him in the hallways … I think it’s a sad thing to deprive the future students of because I don’t know where else you’d get something like that.”

Shoebridge likened the impending CSTC closure to dealing with a dying friend, but in a Facebook address to staff and alumni he vowed to continue the fight to fund and train the future creators of great Canadian screen stories.

“These images and ideas of ourselves as Canadians—we are a distinct peoples, English and French—are too important not to be seen by us or to be made by outsiders,” concluded the patriotic Shoebridge.