Winnipeg: Global Television has licensed a five-part documentary series, Without Warning, from Edmonton-based Great North Productions’ Vancouver subsidiary, Great North Pacific.

Without Warning is a primetime, high-action-adventure series which explores unexpected events such as earthquakes and fires. The Learning Channel has licensed the project for the u.s. The series is budgeted at $400,000 an hour.

The involvement of Global in the documentary series reflects the high ratings docs on real-life adventures and disasters have been pulling in over the past couple of years, says Great North’s Andy Thomson, and is no doubt also a result of the new crtc ruling which allows documentaries to qualify as primetime Cancon.

Great North is projecting 100 hours and $27 million worth of production in the upcoming season, up from last year’s 80 hours and $18 million in production.

In addition to the Global series, Great North has received a licence from History Television for 18 half-hours of Going Home, a new $1.8-million series which follows Canadians as they journey back to their ancestral roots.

Great North has also picked up a broadcast letter from Life Network to produce a 13 half-hour docusoap on a traveling circus. Circus will follow the Garden Brothers Circus over a three-month period as the show travels through small towns across the country. The docusoap will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the assortment of odd characters who perform in the circus. As Thomson points out, ‘You can’t spend your life getting shot out of a cannon and remain normal.’

The series will also explore the relationships between the performers who live and work and travel together for six months of the year and look at the impact of the circus coming to town.

Produced on a budget of $100,000 per episode, a three-person crew will follow the circus caravan in two motor homes, camping out with the troupe and attending setups, rehearsals and shows. The program will be shot on digital Beta and an Avid editing suite will be set up in one of the motor homes so the crew can edit as it goes.

On the renewals front, Discovery Canada and u.s. have ordered an additional 13 episodes of Storm Warnings; History Television is taking 14 new hours of the biography series The Canadians; Acorn: The Nature Nut will go into its eighth season with a licence from Access and scn; and Life has commissioned a second cycle of The Things We Do For Love.

Great North recently delivered Shiver to Life and National Geographic; Crunch and High Seas Rescues to Discovery Canada and Nick of Time and Life and Dare to Life. By March, Thomson anticipates he will receive word on whether additional seasons will be ordered.

Great North’s dramatic series pilot The Beat will air on cbc in March.

While Thomson says the company has several dramatic features and mows in development, it will continue to focus on factual programming, a genre in which it has earned an international reputation.

*On tap at Minds Eye

The children’s series Mentors, coproduced by Regina’s Minds Eye Pictures and Edmonton’s Anaid Productions, has been renewed by Family Channel for an additional 13 episodes, budgeted at $5.2 million. Prepro will begin in June, with the shoot running July to October in Edmonton. This latest order will bring the series to a total of 26 episodes.

Josh Miller at Minds Eye-Alberta also reports the feature film Viva Los Nowhere, a coproduction with Franchise Films of l.a., will begin principal photography March 13 in Calgary. The us$6.5-million project is directed by Jason Bloom and stars Daniel Stern and James Caan.

A Fargo-esque comedy about an aspiring country singer, Viva Los Nowhere is written by Americans Richard Uhlig and Steve Seitz. Kevin DeWalt is the executive producer. Miller is producing with Franchise Films’ Tim Moore. Rhonda Baker is the line producer. Minds Eye, which is a minority producer in the project, holds Canadian rights. On the Canadian side, the funding includes the Alberta Film Development Program and tax credits.

*Flying ghosts and stolen churches at HBW

Helene B. White of Calgary’s HBW Film Corp. recently wrapped post-production on Caitlin’s Way, a family series for ytv and Nickelodeon which will begin airing this spring.

In the meantime, White has several other irons in the fire, including an mow titled Flying Ghosts, based on the novel by Alberta writer Shirleey Smith-Matheson, a well-known historian of air travel and flying.

The family-oriented movie is set in Dawson Creek amidst the building of the Alaskan Highway and the intermingling of the Americans and Canadians working on the project. At the centre of the adventure story is a 15-year-old boy who goes in search of his uncle, a bush pilot, who disappears in the valley of lost planes.

The script is penned by Margaret and Bartley Bard of Calgary. cfcn and Family Channel are financing development. White anticipates a shoot in winter 2001.

A coproduction between hbw and Vancouver’s Forefront Entertainment, A Little Bit of Heaven is based on the book by b.c. writer Winnifred Wier. Set at the turn of the 19th century, the mow is the true story of a small b.c. town called Donald which was closed down by the CP Railroad. Forced to relocate, the residents of the town, who built the local church, decide to steal the building and take it by barge down the river to Windermere, b.c., where it still stands today. The screenwriter is Laurie Finstad-Knizhnick.

The mow is in development with wic and the producers plan to shoot next fall in b.c. Telefilm Canada and B.C. Film have also committed to development. A director has not been attached.

*Fakes, forgery and the world of art dealers

A mysterious painting proclaimed a van Gogh by some art experts and a fake by others is at the centre of a documentary to be produced by Elise Swerhone of Winnipeg’s Riverain Productions for cbc’s Witness.

Titled F614, the documentary looks at a painting which a Winnipeg woman and her brother received as part of an inheritance from their father’s estate. The painting first surfaced in Berlin in 1928 and was one of 33 paintings sold by an art dealer as van Gogh originals. Later, several of the paintings were found to be forgeries and the entire set discredited. Since then, various experts have claimed the paintings to be true van Goghs while others maintain they are fakes.

Swerhone plans to outline the history of the Winnipeg painting and follow its owners as they go about the process of proving that their painting of two cypress trees (catalogue no. F614) is an authentic van Gogh.

Swerhone and Erna Buffie are set to codirect a documentary on drug research to be coproduced by Merit Jensen and the National Film Board for broadcast on The Nature of Things.

Titled L-One, the film will focus in on Toronto Hospital For Sick Children doctor Nancy Oliveri, who is developing the drug L-One to help treat the side effects of drugs given to patients suffering from the genetic blood disorder Thalassemia. In a larger context, the doc explores how drug research is carried out and particularly how the financing of drug research affects both the studies conducted and the researchers themselves.

Swerhone and Buffie codirected the nfb film The Pill.

*Of wrestlers, waiters, cults and comic books

A live-action dramatic series, an animated show, a feature film and an mow are on Edmonton-based Realtime Films’ upcoming slate.

Ken Mead at Realtime anticipates an early summer shoot in Calgary and Edmonton for Brad Fraser’s $1.5-million feature Poor Superman. The story follows a successful painter who experiences an artistic block and, posing as a waiter, goes back to his roots to recreate the most productive period in his life. He winds up involved in an affair with one of the male owners of the restaurant he works in.

Broadcast rights have been sold to Superchannel, TMN-The Movie Network and Citytv. Montreal-based Film Tonic is distributing.

Mead is also developing an mow to be coproduced with Credo Entertainment of Winnipeg. Family Business, written by Fraser, is about a woman in search of her 18-year-old son who disappears after a cult recruits him through their door-to-door marketing company. A-Channel is involved in development of the $3-million movie.

The series Boom, a dramedy about a professional boxer turned lawyer who sets up a law office in a modern oil boom town, is loosely based on Willie de Wit, a well-known boxer in the mid ’80s. All sorts of escapades result when this former boxer mingles with the western oil folk.

The project is being developed with vtv, as well as the Alberta ctv affiliates cfrn and cfcn.

Realtime is also working on an animated series called The New Adventures of Dan Cooper, based on the European comic book Dan Cooper about a Canadian pilot on exchange to the Belgian Air Force. Mead describes Cooper as a James Bond-type character, the only difference being that all his adventures take place in the air.

The action-adventure series is a coproduction with Vancouver-based companies Sky Entertainment and Delaney & Friends, which will provide the animation. The writer is Sky’s Martin Borycki.

*Saskatoon kids film fest

The 5th rendition of Flicks: Saskatchewan International Children’s Festival – which programs award-winning films for and about children – runs March 10-12 in Saskatoon. This year’s lineup includes features from France, Norway, the Netherlands, the u.s., Germany, Ireland and Canada and shorts from Australia, Denmark, Japan and Canada.

Canadian films in the lineup include Helen Shaver’s Summer’s End and Raymond Jafelice’s Babar: King of the Elephants, produced by Nelvana. A retrospective of short films by National Film Board animator Co Hoedeman will include The Box, The Owl and the Lemming and Tchou-tchou.

The festival consists of public screenings as well as screenings for school groups. Workshops include animation for children, led by Toronto animator Patrick Jenkins (creator of Kidsworks, a tv series of animated films), and a musical scoring for film with Paul Inston, who has worked with Atom Egoyan, among others. Kids from across Saskatchewan have been invited to submit seven-minute videos and a selection of top videos will screen at the festival and vie for an award sponsored by Minds Eye Pictures.

Awards will be handed out to the best short, feature, and animated film as well as an award (juried with the participation of unicef) for the film which best exemplifies the rights of the child.

Flicks is an independent charitable organization. The producer is Cass Cozens.