Vancouver: As part of the cross-country series of launches previewing the National Film Board’s 1999/2000 season and celebrating the board’s 60th anniversary, the Pacific Centre office unveiled its slate of work in Vancouver June 1.

Upcoming documentaries, for instance, include the coffee-inspired Java Jive (David Ozier), which will be on cbc’s Rough Cuts in the fall; a biography of Jeni Legon (Grant Greschuk), a Vancouver resident who broke the color barrier for black women in old Hollywood; and Opre Roma: Gypsies in Canada (Tony Papa), a project about the culture of a long-persecuted culture and will air as a cbc Arts and Entertainment special.

Other docs include Through a Blue Lens (Veronica Mannix), which follows an innovative group of police officers called the Odd Squad through Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside; T’Lina: The Rendering of Wealth (Barb Cranmer), a Vision tv project about the oolichan fishery; Wild Goose Chase (Len Gilday), a wildlife project produced for cbc’s Nature of Things; and, Yuxweluptun (Dana Claxton), about contemporary native artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. The latter documentary screened at the Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival in May and screens at the Reel Aboriginal Film Festival in Toronto and the Terres en vue Film Festival in Montreal this month.

Through the animation, children’s and interactive department come nine new projects, none of them animated and most of them geared for the educational market.

Hanging Out (Wesley Lowe) is a video that focuses on internalized racism in the Chinese community. A Love that Kills (Annie O’Donoghue) is about a woman who was murdered by her partner. Pocket Desert: Confessions of a Snake Killer (Teresa Marshall and Craig Berggold) is about an endangered ecosystem in southern b.c. A Safer World (Jan Padgett) is a teen-oriented exploration of homophobia. What Is. . . ? (Don White) is a series of short films that offer new looks at common, everyday objects. And Burns Bog (Don DeMille) is a project that explores the ecologies of bogs and swamps.

Interactive titles include Masks: Faces of the Pacific (DNA Media), a cd-rom about mask making in five cultures, www.paperfold (dna), a website about origami, and Defining Canada: Active Citizenship for the 21st Century (James Monro), a cd-rom about the socio-democratic values that Canadians share.

* What goes down, comes up

it’s a reversal of trend. Seven Days, the upn series about a time traveler, is moving from Los Angeles to Vancouver, confirms the BC Film Commission.

This development follows Vancouver’s high-profile loss of The X-Files last year and prior to that the now-defunct series Sliders.

Chris Carter’s series Millennium has been shot down before it can ring in the New Year, but Fox has picked up the producer’s new show Harsh Realm.

nbc has picked up the pilot for Cold Feet, a series produced by longtime Vancouver advocate Steve Sassen, formerly of Cannell and more recently Fox Television. Sassen produced the breakthrough series (in terms of Vancouver production) 21 Jumpstreet.

Also on nbc will be Dodge’s City, a cop show made by Paramount. It is earmarked as a mid-season replacement show.

And Lions Gate Entertainment’s syndicated Cliffhangers – described alternatively as Baywatch on a mountain or Outward Bound meets Party of Five – is also set to shoot this summer.

The series Wonder Cabinet, a pilot shot in Vancouver earlier this year, has apparently not been picked up. And the jury is still out on Columbia series The Expert and Family Law.

* Back in the saddle again

The second season of Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy begins production on 13 episodes June 14. Actors Sarah Chalke, Yannick Bisson and Ted Atherton reprise their roles and production runs until Oct. 26. Vancouver’s Milestone Productions is handling production of the second season on its own after the first season’s production, shared with distributor Alliance Atlantis.

Larry Sugar’s half-hour kids’ series So Weird entered its second season of production May 3. The first season, which was completed earlier this year, was picked up and led to an additional 26 episodes on the Disney Channel.

Production on the second season – with One Day at a Time’s Mackenzie Phillips back in a lead role – runs until Nov. 26.

* Mother Corp out West

Calling it the biggest production season of the decade, cbc British Columbia’s 1999/2000 season boasts 10 series, four brand new.

Along with Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy and new seasons of DaVinci’s Inquest, kids’ series Scoop and Doozie, Canadian Gardener, Hockey Talk and cooking show Urban Peasant, cbc b.c. will be involved with teen soap Edgemont Road (Omni Films), daytime talk show In the Company (Sharon Bartlett, producer), six-part primetime series These Arms of Mine (Phil Savath and Susan Duligal, producers), and half-hour sketch comedy show The 11th Hour (Forefront Entertainment), which was bumped because of the cbc strike earlier this year.

* MOWs bring out the vets

Country diva Reba McEntire will take another turn at acting, this time in the cbs mow Christmas in Calico. This frontier-themed story, set in 1905, involves a widow and son who search for the meaning of Christmas through the kindness of strangers. To be shot on the rustic period set of Bordertown in Maple Ridge and also Kamloops, production runs from June 14 to July 12.

American Sam Pillsbury, previously at the helm of Free Willy iii, directs Columbo’s Peter Falk in Showtime mow A Storm in Summer, supervised locally by the Vancouver office of Dufferin Gate Productions. Production on the tv movie, a remake of the story of a bitter old man and his relationship with a troubled young boy, runs June 28 to July 29.

* A half-hour tour

Dawn Wells of Gilligan’s Island fame cohosts Dawn Wells – Reel Adventures, a fishing series for women to air on bctv starting in September.

Expert angler Kathy Ruddick plays cohost on the catch-and-release series by Vancouver’s PS Films. Locations will include b.c.’s Queen Charlotte Islands, the streams of Idaho and Wyoming, the lakes and rivers of Scotland and Iceland, and Mexico’s Pacific coast.

* Notice board

* Britain’s Spice Factory will be the coproducer with Cadence Entertainment on the black comedy Shiney’s Head, about an Australian Aborigine who travels to Dublin to repatriate a head. Telefilm Canada, B.C. Film and TMN-The Movie Network are aboard for the production that will shoot this fall in Vancouver and the u.k. Red Sky holds the Canadian rights.

* Nu Shu – A Hidden Language of Women in China premiered June 4 at Simon Fraser University. The project by Canadian filmmaker Yue-Qing Yang is about ‘female writing,’ a written language developed by otherwise uneducated and illiterate women in Hunan Province in China.

* Howie Woo’s Stealing Kisses won the 1999 Golden Sheaf Award for the best experimental film at the Yorkton Short Film & Video Festival. Local actors Heather Sandvold and Cameron Purvin Good star in the black-and-white film is about an unfaithful couple in the 1940s.