On Dec. 17, Jacques Bensimon will walk out the front door of the National Film Board's offices in Montreal, ending a five-year run as commissioner during which he - and, he is quick to remind, his staff and colleagues - have pulled the dear old board back from the brink of oblivion.

Is he happy? Sad? Ready for a trip to the spa?

"I'm relieved," he says, unapologetically, on the phone from the Sithengi Film and Television Market in South Africa. "It's like walking out of military service and going back to civilian life. It was an amazing task to take on. I knew it wouldn't be easy."

Indeed, it wasn't. When the former filmmaker took on the job in July 2001, the NFB was on the ropes, still reeling from a series of devastating federal cuts that took $26 million - 32% of its annual budget - between 1994 and 1998. The 66-year-old board had been set up with a seemingly impossible task: reinvent itself with no new funding, little support from other agencies, and a slipping public profile.

"The morale at that point was just terrible," he recalls. "The cuts were still in close memory. They had gotten rid of the lab, the shooting stage, and most of the staff filmmakers."

Five years later, the NFB's profile is back up. It netted its twelfth Oscar in 2005 for Chris Landreth's inspired animated short Ryan and marked its return to scripted features with the success of its 2001 coproduction Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner by Zacharias Kunuk. And then there was its return in 2003 to feature distribution - it did well with Joseph Blasioli's The Last Round: Chuvalo vs. Ali - and the opening of a high-tech storefront location in downtown Toronto.

"As an ex-NFBer, when I came in, I had very strong ideas about what I wanted to do," he says. "But I think my main objective was, as corny as it sounds, to be faithful to the spirit that [original commissioner John] Grierson had founded the NFB on." That is, to produce, distribute and promote films about Canada.

Bensimon, 63, says guiding the NFB during these crucial years was a high-wire act of Cirque du Soleil proportions. He needed to reach back to the board's early glory days while moving forward technologically, so as to avoid being left behind by the changes that were happening faster than anyone expected.

His staff and stakeholders appear to be happy with the results.

"There is no question about it: the situation now, as opposed to when Jacques started, is like night and day," says one NFB bureaucrat, speaking on condition of anonymity, who has worked there for more than 15 years. "The staff has morale, [and] there is a connection with the public."

The board employs 460 people in its offices across Canada.

Filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, who won a Genie in 2004 for his NFB copro ScaredSacred, agrees that the board "has been completely revitalized."

"Things were moribund in 2001. The place needed an overhaul. One of the things that Jacques did early on was to travel across the country and meet with filmmakers face to face, to see what we felt needed to be done. It was clear he was very open to feedback," says Ripper.