The Canadian government introduced its Multicultural and Employment Equity policies in a series of attempts to induce federally-controlled institutions to reflect the racial diversity of the Canadian population in their programs and workforces. This is a case study of one institution's response to these policies. It examines the implementation of the six-year New Initiatives in Film (NIF) program begun in 1990 by the now-defunct women's filmmaking unit, Studio D of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and exposes the fault lines along which the goals of the NFB's various constituent parts clashed and meshed with the diverse goals of various parties in NIF's target communities (i.e. "emergent aboriginal and 'of colour' women filmmakers"). I argue that because the NIF program was structured according to the politics of identity ("race" in this case), "artworld" issues of unfair hiring and funding practices in the Canadian film industry, became distorted and expressed as issues of identity. Obfuscating the professional dynamics in the world of Canadian filmmaking by using "race" as an organizing principle did not, in the long-term, assure the sustained inclusion of excluded groups within mainstream institutions. A more effective strategy, the data suggests, would have been for underrepresented groups to cultivate alliances with professionals in the filmmaking industry based on concrete occupational, rather than hypothetical race-based interests.

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