Montreal: About a year after its launch, Spectra Animation and veteran producer Andre A. Belanger have started production on Kid Paddle, a 52 x 11 animation series coproduction with Leon Perrahia (Largo Winch) of France’s Dupuis Audiovisuel. The show is based on a popular Euro comic book series and Belanger says negotiations carried on ‘over four long months.’ Belanger and Spectra VP, television Luc Chatelain are exec producers.

Kid Paddle targets the eight- to 12-year-old crowd and follows the highly interactive adventures of Kid Paddle, Big Bang and Horace, who seem to interact and coalesce with anything that’s fun, especially videogames and spooky movies.

Spectra is putting up 26% of the $2.5 million in financing and will create many of the show’s script and storyboard elements and much of the background coloring.

Belanger worked with Dupuis earlier on the animation series Papyrus. As president of the former Cactus Animation/Motion studios he coproduced 11 international series over a four-and-half-year period.

Kid Paddle will be broadcast next fall in Canada on Teletoon (French and English) and in France on M6 and specialty channel Canal J. Belanger has applied to the Canadian Television Fund for LFP funding. He says Teletoon and YTV are basically the only Canadian animation services that offer licences capable of triggering public production investments.

Belanger and France Animation have just signed a development deal for an animation series called Space DJs.

Spectra Animation was launched in September 2001 and is one of five TV production companies in the l’Equipe Spectra fold.

Atopia shoots A Silent Love

A Silent Love, from writer/director Federico Hidalgo (The Case of Danny Lester), is a cross-cultural love story about people who fall in love with the wrong person. Produced by Pascal Maeder of Atopia, it was filmed on location in Montreal and small-town Mexico over 26 days starting Oct. 1. The film was shot in English and in Spanish. Distributor Film Tonic anticipates a fall 2003 release.

Leads are Mexican New Wave actor Vanessa Bauche (Oscar-nominated Piedras Verde) as Gladys, a young woman who marries a much older Montreal teacher through an Internet agency, and Montreal actor Noel Burton as the teacher who rather improperly ends up falling in love with Gladys’ tagalong mother. Burton’s filmography includes La Moitie gauche du frigo, the upscale doc history series Chiefs, The Art of War and Agent of Influence.

DOP Francois Dagenais (Between the Moon and Montevideo, One Eyed King) shot on Super 16mm film. The production designer is Gabriel Tsampalieros, whose credits include the Tele-Quebec series Delirium and the Rodrigue Jean road movie Yellowknife.

Maeder, a graduate of Concordia University’s film program and the Dummies Theatre troupe, produced and directed his first feature film Motel in 1993. He produced Attila Bertalan’s futuristic feature Between the Moon and Montevideo in 1999 and Daniel Cross’ 90-minute doc S.P.I.T: Squeegee Punks in Traffic in 2001. S.P.I.T. had a 10-week theatrical run in Montreal and is also slated to screen in Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg in early 2003.

Another project, El Ring, premiered at this fall’s Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media and chronicles life in a working-class Havana neighborhood. The 10-minute short is composed of a series a black-and-white stills by photographer Carl Valiquette, animated film-style by director Richard Gravel.

A Silent Love was produced on a budget of $1.5 million. The film received a $450,000 advance from Film Tonic. Producer Luc Dery assisted Atopia with presales to The Movie Network, Movie Central and Showcase Television. Investors include Telefilm Canada, SODEC and The Harold Greenberg Fund.

Atopia (atopia.com) plans to produce low-budget movies and Internet content, including a made-for-the-Web episodic series.

Daudelin wins

Prix Albert-Tessier

Outgoing Cinematheque Quebecoise executive director Robert Daudelin is this year’s recipient of the Prix Albert-Tessier, the highest distinction awarded by the Quebec government in the field of cinema. Daudelin, who headed the internationally renowned archival institution since 1972, resigned last month. The award includes a $30,000 grant.

The Cinematheque Quebecoise (www.cinematheque.qc.ca) is a private, non-profit institution founded in 1963 and dedicated to the preservation, documentation and promotion of international film and TV heritage. The Cinematheque’s collection includes 35,000 film titles and 15,000 hours of TV and videotape recordings, including an extensive international animation archive.

Daudelin was elected president of the Cinematheque in 1971. In 1974, he was named a director of the Federation internationale des Archives du Film, later becoming its director-general and president. He supervised construction of the Cinematheque’s impressive conservation centre in suburban Boucherville in 1975 and a significant expansion in 1989.

Daudelin is the cinema chronicler for the Radio-Canada radio series Carnets des Arts and is active on many boards and committees and as a programming consultant to international film festivals and events.

The Cinematheque’s current program includes a retrospective of films coproduced by ARTE; tribute screening programs in honor of production house Rose Films and film coop Main Film; and La France tout court, a Nov. 28 to Dec. 11 retrospective of 20 short films produced in France between 1989 and 2001 and programmed by the editors of Bref and 24 Images.

Daudelin’s replacement as executive director is Robert Boivin.