Oh, isn’t it ironic? While much of southern Manitoba was either flooded or scared out of their homes, a Winnipeg producer was having trouble finding a warehouse she could flood for a dance performance film, Journey, starring Evelyn Hart and Louis Robitaille.

‘It was always a little interesting when we got to the part where we said we were looking for a building we could flood. Usually they’d say, ‘Why don’t you just look around the corner? There’s probably one that’s already there,’ ‘ says Vonnie Von Helmolt.

She found her warehouse, and the $1-million project, cowritten by choreographer Patti Caplette and director Barbara Willis Sweete, begins filming this month for debut on Bravo! The three-act film will feature Robitaille and others dancing across water, hanging on nets and flying in harnesses.

In fact, a brief scarcity of warehouse space owing to the flood of relief donations, evacuees and Canadian soldiers was the only flood-related problem for most Manitoba film and television producers.

Hardest hit were Jack Clements and Aaron Kim Johnston of John Aaron Productions (The Arrow, For the Moment), who were evacuated from their river-front homes and office for more than a week.

‘It was a little scary,’ Clements says, adding that the production community quickly jumped into the sandbagging effort. ‘There was enough film crew here to make a movie.’

Carole Vivier of Manitoba Film and Sound Development Corporation says producers were spared loss of work by the timing of the flood and location of the damage.

‘We’re in preproduction and the damage was to an area of the province (south of Winnipeg) that is not often used for filming.’

Despite that, Vivier says she was swamped with calls from concerned colleagues. ‘East, west, even from Hawaii, I had people call wondering if we were under water.’

However, the flood didn’t scare everyone. Manitoba Film and Sound’s annual tour for Hollywood producers will continue as planned, June 2-6. Five are confirmed: nbc vp of production Jim McGee, abc vp of production Dennis Brown, and independents Sue Bugden, Lee Schauer and Ralph Singleton.

As well, Vivier says a couple of unidentified American producers arrived in Winnipeg on Victoria Day to scout locations and line up potential coproducers for an American cable movie based on Stephen King’s short story Trucks. It will be the second adaptation of the story, following King’s directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive, in 1986.

Vivier cites Manitoba’s new tax credit with attracting these and other so-called offshore producers.

‘We’ve been doing a lot of scouting and taking a lot of calls and it’s all because of the new tax credit,’ she says. Announced in March, the $1.5-million program will refund 35% of approved film and tv salaries over the next three years.

This tax credit, the first in Western Canada, can also be thanked for keeping the recently renewed ytv series The Adventures of Shirley Holmes from moving to Vancouver.

Derek Mazur, head of Winnipeg-based Credo Entertainment, which coproduced Shirley with Vancouver’s Forefront Entertainment, is blunt: ‘Shirley stayed here because of the tax credit. If it hadn’t come through, I would have moved it. Those discussions were serious.’

In addition, Mazur, also president of the Manitoba Motion Picture Industries Association, says the program pulled Credo’s first feature back home from Alberta.

Wit’s End, a $2-million-plus psychological thriller written by Bob Lower, will be shot in Manitoba this fall. Another Credo project on tap this fall is a $3-million tv adaptation of the Margaret Laurence novel The Stone Angel, to be coproduced with Atlantis and written by Linda Svendsen. Their last partnership on a Laurence adaptation, The Diviners, picked up eight Gemini nominations and four awards.

These and other local projects are making for a hectic summer and fall production slate.

Journey will wrap in mid-June. Buffalo Gal Pictures expects to wrap its documentary on Gabrielle Roy mid-July. Credo’s Shirley begins filming 13 new episodes in Winnipeg in July. And John Aaron may be ready to start its feature Partners in Time, a sci-fi fantasy about a boy grieving his mother’s death, in August.

Marble Island Pictures, which produced Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, is hoping for an August start on See Bob Run, a $1-million feature adaptation of Daniel MacIvor’s controversial play about a woman who survives incest with an unexpected vengeance.

Post-production is almost done on the $100,000 Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight, a documentary about Maddin narrated by Tom Waits, an apparent Maddin fan who reluctantly pulled out of the Twilight feature last year. It debuts on Bravo! and then airs on CanWest Global and a string of other networks.

Meanwhile, Maddin (Careful, Tales From Gimli Hospital), awaiting the festival and theatrical debut of Twilight, which stars Shelley Duvall, Alice Krige and R.H. Thompson, has gone back to basics. He’s at work on two five-minute art films produced at the Winnipeg Film Group, a cooperative that serves as his old stomping ground. The Cock Crew, or Love Chaunt of the Chimney, is ‘a tribute to the non-whaling Herman Melville,’ while Maldoror: Tygers is ‘a tribute to evil,’ says Maddin.

Other summer projects include A Billion Films’ Harlan & Fiona, a half-hour drama about small-town con artists that won both the Prairie Wave script competition and a broadcast berth on CBC Manitoba, and The Importance of Being Icelandic, a one-hour documentary to be filmed here in July and to air on CBC Newsworld’s Rough Cuts.

Extremely understated, Mazur says: ‘Our biggest issue now is expanding our crew base.’ Last year, Credo and John Aaron monopolized Manitoba’s two-and-a-half crews with The Arrow and Shirley’s first season.

A year-old training program coordinated by mmpia has fortified the ranks, but more help is needed. Mazur says a training trust fund will further the effort and perhaps even lure film and tv crews to relocate here. ‘The industry will make a lump sum contribution of $20,000 to $30,000 and then a percentage of wages.’

denise duguay is a Winnipeg-based journalist.