It’s an Easter story set at Christmas. A small-town petty criminal searches for redemption while trying to protect his ill son and his ex-wife from a dangerous foe, a former partner in crime who’s been freed from jail. ‘Jerry’s kind of a Christ figure,’ says Winnipeg producer Michael Scott. ‘He tries to protect those around him from his own persecution.’

For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down, coproduced by Credo Entertainment’s Scott and Norma Bailey of Winnipeg’s Flat City Films, didn’t spend long in development purgatory. All partners, including the cbc, were committed to the screenplay before David Adams Richards had even finished the novel. Richards, a New Brunswick author, has won the Governor General’s Award and the Canada-Australia Prize for his fiction and recently picked up a Gemini for the cbc tv movie Small Gifts.

‘He’s a very, very fast writer,’ says Scott. ‘Although, at the onset, he doesn’t want to be seen as cribbing from his book, so he begins again. He’s got his story, but he writes it as a screenplay instead. He isn’t locked into the prose of his book, but he’s certainly locked into his characters and their integrity, the story and the intent.’

Norma Bailey (The True Story of Linda M., Bordertown Cafe) is directing the four-week shoot amid the four-foot-high snowdrifts around Selkirk, Man. Set to wrap on May 3, the crew’s been scrambling to shoot the exterior snow sequences first, even though it would take most of hell’s fury to melt this year’s record snowfall. ‘We’re confronting the coming of spring,’ says Scott, ‘although it seems like it may never come here.’

As for interiors, sets have been built in Credo’s Winnipeg studio to accommodate shooting in the last two weeks of production.

Budgeted at $2.7 million, financing for the mow is split between Telefilm, cbc, Manitoba Film and Sound, the Cable Production Fund and Atlantis Releasing, which will be distributing worldwide. Scott places cbc’s participation slightly below the 25% mark.

Callum Keith Rennie (Curtis’ Charm, My Life As A Dog) and Brent Stait (Yellow Dog, A Man Upstairs) have been cast as the bad guy and the badder guy, respectively. The cast also includes Nancy Beatty (Life With Billy), Brooke Johnson (Due South, Dangerous Offender), Maggie Huculak and Michael Hogan.