Bell Media Partners With All-Black Team for Anthology Series

Bell Media has partnered with an all-Black production team to develop Festivale, Canada’s first bilingual anthology series by and about Black Canadians.

Francophone executive producers Marie Ka and Richard Jean-Baptiste and anglophone executive producers Damon D’Oliveira and Clement Virgo are collaborating on the series, which is an answer to the lack of Black francophone stories on main-stream TV.

Festivale serves as a pre-development incubator administered by the Black Screen Office (BSO), supporting creative teams who have not had the opportunity to produce content for a large network.

“Festivale is a groundbreaking experience where Black Canadian writers, both French and English, get the chance to finally work together on the same project,” said Ka, Jean-Baptiste, D’Oliveira and Virgo. “We can’t thank Bell Media enough for bridging the language gap and lending their support to this timely creative journey. Our hope is that this project will be the starting point for future collaborations with Bell Media, for all our participants.”