Montreal: With a little help from industry supporters, final-year students with Institut national de l’image et du son have completed shooting on Aller Simple, the advanced film school’s first high-definition drama.

The six-day shoot is valued at $300,000, with technical services from Covitec and hd specialist Luc Dussault. The 20-minute short tells the story of a boxing trainer (Maka Kotto) whose reality and dreams are disturbed after a separation. Lea Marie Cantin and Martin Gendron also star. inis students Florence Francois scripted and Nathalie Theocharides directed. Jeannine Gagne was the supervising producer. More help came from art director Normand Sarrazin and dop Allen Smith.

Gagne, whose Amazone Films recently completed a 35mm short called Fais semblant que tu m’aimes, says post plans for Aller Simple include a 35mm transfer and a gala hd screening at Ex-Centris.

inis has accepted 2000/01 cycle applications from 17 new students in production, directing and screenwriting. The three-and-a-half-year-old school hopes to begin an interactive multimedia screenwriting program this fall. Meanwhile, three final-cycle projects from Marianne Mavrakis, Simon Gravel and Stephane Morissette are in production. Each of the students receives an automatic $5,000 bursary from inis.

*Southam directs Island of the Dead

director Tim Southam completed filming in mid-December on Island of the Dead, a $3.5-million supernatural thriller from A-List Productions and producers Luciano Lisi and Christine Kavanagh.

The film stars Malcolm McDowell (The Visitors, Caligula, A Clockwork Orange) as a big-time crooked developer, Talisa Soto (Don Juan de Marco) as a police detective, and Bruce Ramsey and rising hip-hop artist Mos Def (aka Dante Beze) as prison inmates. Daniel Pilon, in the role of the mayor of New York, Kent McQuaid and Michel Perron are also featured. Elite Productions handled casting.

Inspired by the real Hart Island off Manhattan, last stop for an estimated one million ‘unknowns’ buried in mass graves by cons from Rikers Island, Island of the Dead pits supernatural forces – including a swarm of protective, vengeful flies – against an unscrupulous condo developer.

Thirty-nine Quebec directors were carefully screened (and interviewed) for this project, says Lisi, one of the exec producers on two ’99 releases, Ladies Room and Allan Goldstein’s Home Team, an A-List feature coproduced with Montreal’s Transfilm.

‘We wanted somebody who could take what was essentially a b movie and elevate it to a festival film,’ says the producer, ‘and Tim Southam (The Tale of Teeka, Drowning in Dreams) was the best of the bunch. As a result of his vision, we think we have an excellent film, and a very strong morality tale, which is what we wanted from the beginning.’ The screenplay is from Peter Koper (Variety, Two Evil Eyes).

Showcase Entertainment in l.a. is the international sales agent on Island of the Dead. France Film/Equinox has Canadian rights. Presales have been made to Unapix in the u.s. and to Germany, Italy and Japan. The National Bank of Canada provided production financing; Comerica Bank of California provided gap and presale financing.

Southam projects in the works include the feature The Bay of Love and Sorrows, based on the David Adams Richards novel and slated to shoot next summer by Toronto’s Triptych Media, and a six-part tv comedy series called The Accident, coscripted with Michael Mackenzie.

dop Daniel Jobin originated Island of the Dead on 35mm Fuji film. Yvon Benoit was sound recordist, in-camera effects were handled by Ryal Cosgrove and Mario Hervieux production designed. Other effects were created by Olivier Xavier and ‘fly wrangler’ Francis Bourdon. Heidi Haines (The Tale of Teeka) is editing on an Avid Film Composer. Covitec provided lab services.

A former resident of Halifax, Lisi says A-List aims to produce between two and three films a year.

*Grier, Hauer star in Slow Burn

coming off a very productive year, Cinequest Films producer Shimon Dotan recently wrapped his third feature in ’99, the Rodney Gibbons suspense Slow Burn.

Leading players in the $5-million movie include international stars Pam Grier – whose career has been rekindled since starring in the genre-bending gangster movies Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown – in the role of a single mom and maverick cop out for revenge, and the charismatic Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, Inside the Third Reich, The Tenth Kingdom). Romano Orzari (Omerta iii), Serge Houde, Eugene Clark, Richard Robitaille, Simone-Elise Girard and Sonia Benezra are also featured. Casting was by Barbara Casting.

Robert Ditchburn was the shoot’s first ad, Bert Tougas was the dop, Martha Fernandez was the pm and Jacqueline Trenta was the art director. The film was crewed by the stcvq.

Cinequest also produced The List and Cause of Death in ’99. Dotan says he was especially pleased doing business with gap financier fidec on Slow Burn.

*A Wintonick whirlwind

Documentary filmmaker Peter Wintonick is a whirlwind of international activity. His agenda includes prepping a 35mm blowup of the National Film Board doc-history coproduction Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment. The doc tied for best Canadian film at the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media and took home a Special Jury Prize from the ’99 Vancouver International Film Festival. It is slated to screen this year at festivals in Bombay, Edmonton (Local Heroes, March 31 to April 8) and Berlin. A gala screening of Defining the Moment is also anticipated for Hot Docs (May 1-7) in Toronto.

The film opens theatrically in Montreal this month at Ex-Centris, and Wintonick says Jane Taylor of the nfb sales office in London, Eng. is reporting quite a bit of international interest.

Meanwhile, Wintonick has a couple of weeks of editing left on the one-hour doc special StoryTellers and the Oral Tradition, produced by Wintonick’s house Necessary Illusions and codirected by Yukoner Christine Clarke.

The rest of his schedule is taken up with writing film critiques for doc mag pov and lobbying funders like Telefilm Canada and the Canadian Television Fund on behalf of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus.

Wintonick (Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media) has just finished research and putting the money pieces together on a new international doc epic called Utopia. The film includes original location footage from Japan, Ireland, the Canadian North, India and New York City, with projected support for the $400,000 production from the nfb, a Canadian pubcaster/educaster, Channel 4 in the u.k. and Vision tv.

The director is also involved in Cutting Truths, a Sept. 17-20 think tank/forum on the past and future of docs, from cinema verite to the personal essay and digidocs. It is being produced in association with the Banff Centre for the Arts’ New Media Institute and the cifc. Filmmakers are invited to register by calling (403) 762-6180.

*De Niro film in Montreal

City of Montreal film commissioner Andre Lafond wrapped the year that was on a positive note, confirming the Mandalay Pictures/ Eagle Point Productions/Horseshoe Bay Productions movie The Score (working title) will shoot on location in Montreal in late March. The film stars Robert De Niro. Frank Oz will direct for producers De Niro, Gary Foster and Lee Rich. The distrib is Paramount.

Final arrangements between the producers and Montreal equipment and studio providers, Locations Michel Trudel and Mels Cite du Cinema, were ironed out just before the holiday break. Lafond estimates local benefits at about 25% of the film’s $60-million budget.

Preproduction on The Score, in which De Niro plays a professional crook who actually resides in Montreal, starts this month.

Meanwhile, the Eddie Murphy sci-fi comedy Pluto Nash is also slated to start filming here in March.