After about 18 years in doc and info production, High Road Productions, producers of Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows and CBC Newsworld’s CounterSpin, will launch a division dedicated to fiction. Company president Paul Jay says High Road will make a serious push on the fiction side.

According to Jay, the company has found new private investment and will hire additional people – with feature film experience – to produce and develop the feature slate.

In development is a theatrical feature on wrestlers Brett and Owen Hart; the latter is also the subject of a doc currently in production, so the feature will combine stories from that doc and Hitman Hart.

The Sunroom, a psychological thriller that takes place in a hospital for the criminally insane (which Jay himself is hoping to direct) is also in development. The plan is to shoot both next spring or summer.

Other features on High Road’s new path include Salome’s Last Dance, the story of Canadian dancer Maude Allen. Based on the book Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand by Philip Hoare, the story takes place before and during the First World War and is about political scandal, conspiracy, fascism, and sex.

Promise, based on the book Tragic Victory, is a memoir written in 1945 about a young Jewish girl who escapes from a Nazi concentration camp.

On the doc side of the road the prodco is in the works on Justice Denied, a 90-minute series pilot for tnt featuring a real lawyer and detective team which investigates what appear to be innocent people in u.s. prisons. Jay says it will have the dramatic feel of Law & Order while reflecting reality.

Another doc on the go is The Blues Brothers Take Las Vegas about two Canadian performers who do a Blues Brothers routine, and go to Vegas to try out for the ‘Legends’ show. In an effort to figure out whether this is a town they could actually live in, the duo interviews, in character, the residents of the town. And it’s back to sin city again for Sharks, a doc about a gang of Toronto kids on their way to compete in the world championship of poker with a shot at taking home a $1 million prize.