Montreal: Based on the Dominique Demers book of the same name, Un Hiver de Tourmente is a coming-of-age story of 15-year-old Marie, played by Quebec actress Marie-France Monette. Monette is featured in the Roger Cantin family fantasy Matusalem and the current sequel.

In this story, set in a small Laurentian village, Marie is left on her own as she struggles to sort out feelings following her mother’s death and her father’s inability to cope.

An official Canada/France coproduction between Cinar Films and Image & Compagnie, filming on this 16mm 90-minute tv movie wrapped earlier this month.

Cast includes Audrey Laurin, French actor Thierry Fortineau as Marie’s father, Alexandre Merineau, Pierre Leblanc, Johanne-Marie Tremblay, Aubert Pallascio, Genevieve Rioux and Sophie Lorain.

Cinar’s Patricia Lavoie is producing. French director Bernard Favre’s most recent credit is the feature film Pondicherry, dernier comptoir des Indes starring Charles Aznavour and Richard Borhinger.

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Another young local talent in the Cinar fold is Natalie Vansier (Lassie), who has been cast in the title role of Sally Marshall Is Not An Alien, an mow coproduced with Infinity Pictures of Australia where the film is currently shooting.

‘Not only are we casting people in Montreal for local series, we’re also casting people here to go into our coproductions in other countries,’ says Lavoie.

– Action profile

Filming on the first leg of the Ajawaan Productions historical drama Grey Owl starts in mid-March for one week and resumes mid-April for two months, with Lord Richard Attenborough directing and Attenborough, Jake Eberts (The Education of Little Tree) of Allied Filmmakers and Claude Leger of Montreal’s Transfilm producing. The film is a Canada/u.k. coproduction with a reported budget of $45 million.

Filming began mid-month on the Valentino Film feature Waking the Dead, written and directed by Keith Gordon (Mother Night) and produced by Gordon, Stuart Kleinman and Linda Reisman, who coproduced on Mother Night and Paul Schrader’s Affliction, shot here last fall. The distributor is PolyGram. Irene Litinsky is the supervising producer.

New film starts, according to the stcvq, include the Productions Tele-Action four-hour miniseries Big Bear with Colin Neale executive producing, Claudio Luca and Dorothy Schreiber producing, and Gil Cardinal directing.

The Filmline International suspense thriller Eye of the Beholder begins shooting March 23 for nine weeks. The producer is Nicolas Clermont. Stephan Elliott is directing.

Productions du Regard producer Jean-Roch Marcotte and director Jean Beaudin began filming Feb. 23 on the Monique Proulx feature adaptation Homme invisible a la fenetre.

Additional action includes Allegro Films’ The Best Revenge, directed by Marc Grenier; the Productions Slingshot Taxman feature Taxman, directed by Alain Zaloum; and the Transfilm feature Ladies Room, set to start April 1, with Tony Roman, Claude Leger and Rene Malo producing.

The Kingsborough Greenlight Pictures feature To Walk With Lions is slated to begin principal photography on location in troubled Kenya March 10 for eight weeks. Carl Schultz is directing and Pieter Kroonenburg and Julie Allan are producing.

Kingsborough and director Rodney Gibbons have another feature in development, Becky Sharp. It’s slated to film in the u.k. in mid-April.

Quebec tv series action includes the second leg (Feb. 9 to April 22) of the Immergence ‘network’ drama Reseaux, produced by Louise Gendron, and the 20 half-hour Cinar Films family series The Mysteries of Shelby Woo, produced in association with Nickelodeon, with Stuart Harding producing.

The 10-hour Rose Films series Juliette Pomerleau lenses March 23 to mid-August, with Claude Fournier (J’en suis) directing and Marie-Josee Raymond producing.

Georges Mihalka is directing the SDA Productions crime series Omerta iii. Claude Bonin and Nicole Hilareguy are the supervising producers. Production begins Feb. 23 and goes 20 weeks to mid-August.

– Hopes for Quebec City

Bureau du Film, Region Quebec, the formal name for the Quebec City and region film and tv commission headed by Liliane Tremblay, has hopes of bringing two American tv series to the provincial capital this year.

Tremblay, who manages an annual budget of $300,000 from the Quebec Urban Community, travels to l.a. this month to pursue the hush-hush leads.

– FIPA prize for Gregoire

Quebec actor Helene Gregoire has won the award for ‘best performance by an actress in a series’ at the 11th edition of Festival international des programmes audiovisuels. Gregoire won for her role as Marie, one of the very few sympathetic religious authority figures in the Tele-Action miniseries Les Orphelins de Duplessis. fipa is an annual showcase for international tv productions held annually in Biarritz, France.

Top drama prizes at fipa this year went to Joe Dante’s The Second Civil War (u.s.), a dark comedy on immigration in the u.s., and Alex Pillai’s Flight (u.k.). The top documentary award went to Pekka Lehto’s Boy Hero 001, a sweeping portrayal of 70 years of Russian political history.