From sea to sea

THE MARITIMES

The Atlantic Film Festival (AFF) will be showing off two new homegrown works by Halifax actor-writer-director Thom Fitzgerald. His Tennessee Williamseque first dramatic feature, The Hanging Garden, stars New Zealand actress Kerry Fox (Angel at My Table, Shallow Grave) and includes a cameo from Cape Breton fiddling sensation Ashley MacIsaac. Also on the bill is Fitzgerald's piffy video short Canada Uncut, a satire that sends up Canadian Customs' campaign against gay and lesbian bookstores. Last year AFF audiences got to see the entire six-episode season of William D. MacGillivray's comedy Gullages. The acclaimed series walked away with a clutch of awards. This year only a sneak preview of one or two episodes will grace the screens of the AFF; the rest will have to wait for broadcast in the fall. Some long-awaited documentary projects are finally surfacing at this year's festival. John Brett (Sea of Slaughter, Where the Bay Meets the Sea) has finally wrapped the postproduction of his personal take on the collapse of the East Coast fishery, One Man's Paradise. Chuck Lapp has also treated the subject from a wider point of view in his film, Fishing on the Brink. Newfoundland's Debbie McGee's An Untidy Package examines the plight of women in fishery's downturn. Nigel Markham's look at the changes looming due to the massive Voisey Bay development, Eye of the Storm, is also slated for the festival. Mike Clattenburg's extraordinary travel documentary, Far From Home: India Kicked My Ass, returns the Telefilm Award-winning director to his personal nonfiction roots. In the wake of the news that three Halifax soundstage projects have been green-lighted by the three levels of government and various private partners, there has been a rush of filmmaking activity across the entire region. Financing demands on the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation have been so high that Chairwoman Bonnie Kirby had to request more money from her provincial masters. She succeeded in doubling NSFDC's budget, ensuring a continued film boom in Nova Scotia. Provincial film corporations in Newfoundland and New Brunswick are now firmly established and even tiny Prince Edward Island has a dedicated film commissioner. On the production front, Salter Street Films is working on two new comedy shows. One, written and featuring 22 Minutes star Greg Thomey, is a mock health-food-style magazine show entitled Daily Tips for Modern Living; the other is Mondo Delundo, which replaces audio tracks on trashy low-budget series, a la Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? In Newfoundland, several major projects are creeping closer to the green-light stage, including the massive American shoot based on E. Anne Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Shipping News, directed by Lasse Halstrom (My Life as a Dog), and an eight-hour adaption of Bernice Morgan's contemporary classic, Random Passage, being packaged by Montreal-based (but originally from Newfoundland) Barbara Doran.

MONTREAL

The most controversial story coming out of the Quebec film scene these days is about a film that came very close to never getting made. Pierre Falardeau (the fiery Quebec nationalist who directed the controversial Octobre, a sympathetic look at the Quebec Crisis from the point of view of the FLQ) has been trying for two years to produce 15 fevrier 1839, a film about the execution of patriot Chevalier de Lorimier, one of the leaders in the 1837 rebellion. Facing a third refusal from Telefilm Canada (while SODEC had already agreed to finance half the film's budget), Falardeau and his supporters took it to the papers, accusing Telefilm of succumbing to federal pressures and exerting censorship. Of course, Telefilm denied this and was immediately slapped with another fiery response from Falardeau. But then something unique happened. A popular committee was formed to raise funds and devised a series of actions and events to reach the public -- T-shirts, postcards, books, videos, etc. In addition to the many top Quebec actors who have been attached to the project since the beginning (Luc Picard, Sylvie Drapeau, Julien Poulin), many other names from the entertainment industry (among them Quebec's most popular poet, Gilles Vigneault, and rock star Eric Lapointe) soon joined the crusade, participating in benefit concerts and marching in the traditional Defile de la St-Jean on June 24th. So far the committee has received donations totalling $20,000; however, Falardeau needs another $1.25 million to make his film. Be sure he will get it; simply put, the people are with him. On a sad note, Jean-Claude Lauzon, consider one the brightest lights in Quebec cinema, died in a plane crash while on a fishing trip in Northern Quebec in August. Only 43 years old, Lauzon was known in the French press as a rebel with a bright future. His reputation is based on only three films: a short, Piwi, his debut feature, Un Zoo la nuit, winner of 13 Genies in 1988 (the most ever by any film in the history of the awards), and the surreal Leolo, which screened in competition at Cannes in 1992 and was nominated for an Oscar. Lauzon's legend is that of a troubled dropout who transformed himself into an artist able to express semi-autobiographical down and dirty themes with elegant craftsmanship. Despite his success, Lauzon frequently expressed doubts about his profession, he turned down numerous offers to go to Hollywood, claiming that hunting and flying bush planes were more satisfying to him than moviemaking. Tragically, his love of flying has brought about his untimely death. Canadian cinema has lost one of its best.

TORONTO

Although the Cannes Film Festival had to swivel its magic stick in order to find some quality flicks this year, The 22nd Toronto International Film Festival seems to have fared better with its Gala selection. Opening the festival is hometown favourite Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, the movie that walked away with the Grand Prix and International Critics' Prize at Cannes. Based on the book by Russell Banks, the film focuses on a small town emotionally devastated following a school-bus crash. Making its World Premiere is Mrs. Dalloway by Antonia's Line director Marleen Gorris, based on Virginia Woolf's novel of the same name. Vanessa Redgrave stars as the woman preparing for an important soiree, and remembers her youth through flashbacks. Another book adaptation making its Gala premiere is Gillies MacKinnon's Regeneration, based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Pat Barker, starring Jonathan Pryce as the psychiatrist who treats four shell-shocked First World War soldiers. And you can't have a film festival without a period Gala, and this year it's Vera Belmont's Marquise starring the gorgeous Sophie Marceau (Braveheart) as the most infamous courtesan of Louis XIV's reign. Also making its North American premiere is what most critics at Cannes called the best film of the year, Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential. Again based on a novel (James Ellroy's crime epic), the movie stars Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger, Danny De Vito, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce in a tale about three police officers working the beat in 1950s Los Angeles. The Feature Film Project, a training initiative of the Canadian Film Centre, has been renewed for two more years, it was announced in August. With an approximate budget of $1.8 million, The Feature Film Project will provide the necessary financing to develop, produce and market three low-budget feature films by first-time feature filmmakers over the next two years. It's a busy time for production this fall in Toronto with John Landis's The Blues Brothers 2000 (with John Goodman and Dan Aykroyd) and Toronto-based PNA's Shepherd (with C. Thomas Howell and David Carradine) just wrapping up, Mira Nair's My Own Country with Marisa Tomei and Nareen Andrews halfway done, and Tamra Davis' Half Baked making waves with her hot young cast (Mark Whalberg, Rachel True and Dave Chappelle). Meanwhile Saul Rubinek's Tom & Jerry, starring Sarah Polley and Joe Mantegna, just tore down its tents and moved out of town. Veteran Toronto-based producer Ralph Ellis, founder of Ellis Enterprises and KEG Productions (producer of hundreds of films and TV specials about Canada's wildlife since 1964), was awarded the Order of Ontario earlier this year and will be inducted into the Order of Canada for his contribution to mass media.

WINNIPEG

Bedtime stories take on a new meaning in director Jeff McKay's documentary about the role of the bed in human culture. Traditionally associated with "promiscuity, slothfulness and lazy people," McKay says there are a lot of high-achieving people who worked out of their beds, including Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, John Milton, Sibelius, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a woman in Beverly Hills who is owner of the patent for the push-up bra. Kent Martin is producing for the NFB. Buffalo Gal Pictures is co-producing a new feature-length documentary about the life of the late Winnipeg-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau. Shooting will begin in the late summer in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles and Winnipeg. Winnipeg writer Larry Krotz travelled to Africa to document an exciting discovery by a group of Winnipeg doctors who have discovered a small group of prostitutes working out of a slum in Nairobi who have seemingly developed an immunity to the HIV virus. The Winnipeg Film Group recently premiered one of the strongest collection of shorts in recent memory. Three of the films have been invited to the Montreal World Film Festival--Patrick Lowe's Gerald the Genie, Gord Wilding's Rapture and Kathryn Martin's Through My Eyes. Other titles include Barry Gibson's hilarious portrait of UFO and psychic researchers, A Question of Reality; Noam Gonick's gay steambath interpretation of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike entitled 1919; and Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan's naughty take on a 1950s housewife led astray, Good Citizen: Betty Baker. During the recent shooting of a new Guy Maddin short in the Winnipeg Film Group studio, the office staff were greeted every morning by a rooster crowing every 10 minutes. Entitled The Cock Crew, the eight-minute short is based on two Herman Melville short stories, "I and My Chimney" and "Cock-A-Doodle-Do." Winnipeg filmmaker Carole O'Brien has been invited to the Director's Lab program at the Canadian Film Centre. O'Brien is the first Manitoban to invited to attend the program. Her films include The Piano Lesson and Motus Maestro. Crime Wave's director John Paizs has been signed on as production designer for Marble Island Pictures' Push. Tanya Allen (The Newsroom) and Matthew Ferguson (Lilies and Love and Human Remains) have been signed as the principal cast in this story of a young woman whose everyday life takes second place to a compulsive need to find her abusive father. Push will be directed by Jeff Erbach (Soft Like Me). And finally, animator-extraordinaire Richard Cordell (The Cat Came Back) is halfway through a new film, Strange Invaders, about the effect newborn children have on the lives of their parents.

THE PRAIRIES

The phrase heard most these days in Alberta and Saskatchewan's production circles isn't "Action!" or "Cut!" It is "Tax credit, please." And we still waiting. Industry lobbyists have been hard at work in both provinces encouraging their governments to adopt a tax-credit scheme similar to those in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but progress is slow and nothing new is expected until early in the new year. In the meantime, productions do roll. In Saskatchewan, The Edge Productions' MOW, Summer of the Monkeys, is a marked departure for the province. Mark Prasuhn, general manager of SaskFILM, says it was the first dramatic production in Saskatchewan since the 1980s to go ahead without SaskFILM money, a fact he's proud of. "It means we're attracting productions on a locations basis, and in the past we haven't enjoyed that kind of profile," Prasuhn says. Also in Saskatchewan, a Heartland Motion Pictures/Shaftsbury Films (from Toronto) feature called Conquest goes into production in September. A romantic comedy, it's one of the first features to be produced under the new CBC theatrical envelope of the Equity Investment Program and will be distributed worldwide by Malofilm. Over in Alberta, last year's precut production heights may be a distant memory, but the fat lady ain't sung yet. Buena Vista Television's one-hour weekly comedy-adventure series, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids will likely remain in production until March 1998. Also airing this fall are 13 new episodes of North of 60, shot in the spring. No official word yet on North of 60's future, leaving fans and crews alike waiting with bated breath. More series may be in the works, though, following two pilots shot this summer in Edmonton. Great North's The Orange Seed Myth and Other Lies Mothers Tell is a half-hour drama set in the 1970s, a kind of Chinese-Canadian Wonder Years and is set to air in the fall. The Genius (Anaid Productions/Minds Eye Pictures) stars Elliott Gould as Albert Einstein, a time-traveller turned mentor for a bright young computer whiz, and airs at Christmas on CFRN. Finally, A-Channel, Craig Broadcast Systems' new Alberta endeavour, makes its debut this fall. Its motto is "Interactive, Innovative, Independent," and looks to be a kind of CityTV West. With infrastructure (employees and a studio) as well as programming still to be put in place, the A-Channel team admits it will have to work hard to meet a scheduled mid-September air date.

VANCOUVER

It's been an excellent year for Canadian film and television production in Western Canada and in Vancouver in particular. Gary Burns (The Suburbanators) has just finished the sound mix on his second feature, Kitchen Party, which showcases the talents of some of Canada's hottest young talent, Scott Speedman, Sarah Strange, as well as Vancouver veterans Kevin McNulty, Jerry Wasserman and Tom McBeath. Burns has considerable talent for social satire and sets his sights on unravelling the quiet facade of suburban civility. One night when Scott's parents are away, he decides to have a few friends over for a party. As the evening unfolds, virtually everything that can go wrong does--both for the kids and their parents. Drive, they will. Mina Shum and her producer Stephen Hegyes (Double Happiness) hit the road to mix their second feature, Drive, She Said, at the Saul Zaentz studio in San Francisco, finishing just in time for the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals. A few of the more interesting projects in development and/or close to going into production include: Jonathan Tamuz's first feature Rupert's Land, Ken Hegan's The Deadline, Sharon MacGowan and Peggy Thompson's Sex & Chocolate. The rumour is that Anne Wheeler might direct. The Vancouver indie community is still abuzz with Baton Broadcasting System's entry into the local television marketplace. VTV will launch in September, and has been purchasing existing and/or licensing new half-hour programming for their two new anthology series. Baton's production slate includes former CBC radio mainstay's Gabereau, with Vicki Gabereau, as well as Linda Cullen and Bob Robertson's Double Exposure. In the "Gawd, what we could do with that kind of money" category, John McTiernan (Die Hard) and entourage are in Campbell River shooting Eaters of The Dead, a mega-budget Viking epic for Disney, starring Antonio Banderas. Eaters has single-highhandedly created more apocryphal production stories than anything seen around here of late. Here are a couple: Eaters is rumoured to have an 85-person wardrobe department (!) and uses literally hundreds of extras a day--which means that pretty much half of the island's population has dyed their hair various shades of blond in the hopes of being in the film. Sadly, the budget for this one film alone (rumoured to be in the $160-million range) could finance the entire output of the Canadian film industry for a year, something to think about next time you slap your eight bucks down.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Canadian Independent Film & Television Publishing Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group