Cinevideo Plus hot off the mark

with feature on The Solar Temple

Montreal: While police and journalists around the world continue to piece together the mysterious events surrounding the incendiary demise of The Solar Temple, Cinevideo Plus president Justine Heroux and French partners are preparing to shoot a feature-length dramatization, ‘a property which will amaze and captivate audiences in all markets,’ according to the producer.

The Apocalypse Cult (working title) will be shot in the next few months on location in Canada, France and Switzerland, and possibly Australia, in coproduction with France’s Banco Productions and TF1.

And while the murder/suicide of 53 members of the notorious New Age cult in Quebec and Switzerland is a bewildering tale of alleged contraband and cosmic returns, it is being handled on the ground as a grisly murder case by police in Switzerland.

Heroux is negotiating with an internationally recognized screenwriter and a Canadian director.

‘The events are so shocking. One of the reasons for producing the movie is that we don’t want such a thing to happen again in future,’ says Heroux.

By late February, Cinevideo will start production on Tales of the Wild II, a collection of six new one-hour tv movies based on adaptations of the Jack London wilderness stories.

The big-budget film package, coproduced with France’s Gaumont and Ellipse Programme, will be a major bonus to the local film economy during the slower winter months. Photography wraps in April.

The screenwriters are Denis Heroux and Nicole Ricard. Astral is the Canadian distributor.

The initial Tales of the Wild package, six 90-minute pay-tv movie specials, cost $24 million and is being broadcast on The Movie Network and Super Ecran in Canada, and on France 3, Canal + and M6 in France.

Heroux adds she’s looking forward to coproducing an animation series with French partners sometime in the near future.

Doing him poetic justice

Cite-Amerique producer Michel Gauthier says he’s rather pleased with the way things have gone on the company’s first minority coproduction, A. Rimbaud, a four-hour miniseries coproduced with France’s Septembre Productions and shot this fall in Morocco.

The story dramatizes the disillusioned poet’s post-literary years and his commercial and gun-running adventures in exotic Abyssinia and across colonial Africa circa 1880.

Canadian talent on the two-month shoot included actors Germain Houde (Les Filles de Caleb), Guy Nadon, Luc Picard (Octobre) and Leli Scoffier. Thomas Vamos was the cinematographer and Patrick Rousseau the shoot’s sound recordist.

Cite-Amerique, producer of Les Filles de Caleb (Emilie) and Blanche, has a 20% interest in the $6.2 million production, slated for broadcast on Radio-Canada and Super Ecran.

The company is in development on a major 10-hour tv series, Margeurite Volant, a 16-year-old girl and the central character of the story which is set at the time of the British conquest of Nouvelle France, circa 1760. Jacques Jacob is the screenwriter.

Klieg lights for the holidays

Principal photography begins Dec. 18 in Montreal and stretches over the holidays into January on director/screenwriter Jean Beaudry’s latest feature film, Nuit Pale (working title).

Produced by Claude Cartier of Productions du Lundi Matin, the film focuses on the dramatic confrontation between two men, both at the point of no return. The setting for the film is a school where 20-year-old Nathanael is locked inside the audiovisual center with the intention of taping a farewell video-letter and ending his life, while Pierre, a philosophical night watchman, receives an unexpected visit from his girlfriend who announces she’s pregnant.

Leading players include Pierre Curzi, Louise Richer and Philippe Antoine-Leroux. Eric Cayla is the dop and the shoot’s co-art directors are Jean-Baptiste Tard and Michele Forest. Luc Vandal is the pm.

Crewed by the stcvq, Nuit Pale has a budget of $1.5 million, with a reported ‘very small investment’ from Telefilm Canada, and a probable fall release by CFP Distribution.

A spring shoot for Transfilm’s Fossil Child

Transfilm president Claude Leger and director/screenwriter Pierre Magny are putting the final touches to Fossil Child, a $12 million historical adventure film slated for a spring shoot in France, China and Montreal.

Leger is the producer of Shadow of the Wolf/Agaguk and the soon-to-be-released science-fiction feature Highlander III: The Sorcerer, a $34 million Canada/ France/u.k. coproduction.

Set in the 1920s, Fossil Child tells the story of a disillusioned Canadian doctor, Philip Scott, whose passion for archaeology leads him to the discovery of mysterious ‘dragon bones,’ the possible missing link between man and monkey.

In an ancient cave in a remote province of China, Scott undergoes a hallucinatory voyage to a prehistoric landscape, the world of the fossil child, vanished over a million years ago.

As for Highlander III: The Sorcerer, it’s slated for a simultaneous North American release in February by Malofilm Distribution in Canada and Miramax in the u.s.