BEFORE THE Canadian Film and Television Production Association delivered its brief to the Citizens Forum on Canada`s Future this past April, it ought to have made Canadian Dreams and American Control required reading - for itself as well as anyone else who professes to care about the state of our movie industry. As it was, the CFTPA put forth the view that a true sense of nationhood and real confidence in who we are ties in controlling our airwaves and our screens with a political and social conviction which is solid and will not be denied. That`s hardly a sentiment a good Canadian would disagree with. But from Manjunath Pendakur`s perspective, the state of our film and television industries is extraordinarily bleak - almost hopeless - having always been a matter of colonial economics. Thus his subtitle - "The Political Economy of the Canadian Film Industry"- and his somewhat shopworn but relevant position statement: Despite pronouncements that attempt to legitimize the nature of state intervention (subsidies and the like) in cultural institutions, Canada remains a cultural colony of the United States ... While 97 per cent of theatre screen time in Canada is filled by imported films - most of which are marketed by U.S.-based media - most films produced by Canadians languished in cans. Pendakur`s "through-line" (as a screenwriter might put it) is an amalgam of neo-classical and Marxian economics, by which he analyses competition and monopoly in three sectors of Canada`s film industry: production, distribution, and exhibition. Extraordinarily well-documented