The Shinny-ing

Hockey Night in Canada + Canada: A People’s History = Hockey: A People’s History, the new 10-hour doc project now underway at CBC and Radio-Canada under producers Mark Starowicz, head of the Corp’s in-house docmakers, Jean Pelletier and Susan Dando.

‘This is more than the story of a sport, this is the story of a people,’ said CBC’s Slawko Klymkiw, exec director of network programming.

The high-def bilingual project will tell the story of shinny and its history in Canada, looking to air in early 2006, reuniting much of the talent from the first People’s History. DOP Michael Sweeney has signed on and is set to work with senior producers Laine Drewery (The Canadian Experience) and Michael Claydon (Life and Times). Murray Green is senior editor. A third senior producer will be named shortly, likely from the net’s French side.

Hockey will look to repeat both the popular appeal and the educational reach of the first series, according to a Ceeb spokesperson, although it has ‘not nearly the same’ budget. -Sean Davidson

North of 39

Toronto: Sunny Yi’s goal? To make three documentaries about North Korea. Her problem? She can’t get past the border because the government there blacklisted her in the early ’90s, following her coverage of president Kim Il Sung’s funeral.

So Yi (Thai Girls, Vanishing Acts) hired a film crew in China, sent them to North Korea, and is splicing their footage with her own 10-year-old archival material for Inside the Hermit Kingdom, a TV hour for CBC that, it is hoped, will be part one of a trilogy about the secretive, rogue state. The $400,000 CTF-backed project is now in post with editor Nick Hector and set to air this summer or fall, possibly on Witness.

Yi will then direct a feature-length follow-up for the National Film Board and History Television, but is keeping the details secret, saying only that the doc ‘deals closely with a North Korean official.’ John Haslett Cuff, her husband and partner at Toronto’s Aysha Productions, will cowrite and coproduce.

Meanwhile, Cuff’s very personal Crimes of the Heart doc will air on TVO in April, turning the camera on his mother and her martial infidelities. It will run again on W Network and The Documentary Channel.

Aysha is also developing a doc about filmmaker Allan King for TVO, and just got an early okay from CTV for a project about Cecilia Zhang, looking at how the nine-year-old girl’s disappearance has strained ethnic tensions within Toronto’s Chinese community.

‘You can’t look at the kidnapping in isolation,’ says Yi. ‘There are problems that exist in every ethnic community.’ Sean Davidson

Elevator action

Toronto: Elevator Films, a new branch of Toronto prodco Trailervision, is partway through its debut feature Escape to Canada, and will deliver the 80-minute doc to Canal D, The Documentary Channel and the National Film Board sometime this summer, according to director and reformed media prankster Albert Nerenberg (Stupidity: The Documentary).

The pic looks at the social impact of Canada’s loosening laws about marijuana and same-sex spouses, positing that our swing to the political left is finally giving the Great White North some much-needed character.

Escape has been shooting on a $170,000 budget since key court rulings came down in Toronto last summer and is thought to be the only serious doc in the works about gay marriage.

Conceived as a short or TV hour, the pic grew to feature-length after attracting the attention of the NFB’s Silva Basmajian. Nerenberg hopes it will be ready in time for the Toronto International Film Festival, and is shopping for distributors. Shannon Brown is exec producer, David J. Bowie will edit.

Escape has also spawned a spin-off TV hour, Don’t Mind If I Do, about the busloads of gay and lesbian couples heading north to tie the knot, but no ‘casters are attached.

Nerenberg and Brown are also exec producing a pilot for Discovery Channel called Why is it Sexy?, which goes to camera in April. The proposed series looks at the science of sexual attraction – why one stimulus (say, low-rider jeans) gets one’s motor running while another (sweater vests?) does not. Sean Davidson