Jerry Ciccoritti is doing well for a director who says he only does episodic work as a means of financing his features. And his filmmaking sensibilities are on display in his Gemini-nominated turn for Sarrazin-Couture’s The City.

‘Properties of Light,’ the episode for which he has been nominated, uses the device of a ‘monster snowstorm’ to trap various series characters in three locations: a house, a car and an elevator stalled between floors.

‘The challenge was how to get drama out of three enclosed spaces,’ Ciccoritti says.

Although such a scenario would seemingly lend itself to the talky style of a stage drama, ‘it was still quite visual. The same principles of filmmaking applied. I was really excited by the script. It was a great challenge for a director as to how do you keep it exciting and visual.

‘The challenge was to take each of the three subplots and arc them visually and emotionally so each was like a complete movie. It meant coming up with a visual style for each scenario so it looks different when you come back.’

Ciccoritti spoke from Halifax where he was working on the sound mix for tv movie Chasing Cain, which he is coproducing with Bernie Zukerman, the first of a projected four on the same theme in the style of Cracker, involving two homicide detectives and a self-contained plot in each episode.

Other projects are on the horizon, among them a feature called Orange, which is set to shoot in Toronto in the spring. The script from Allison Dempsey, star pupil of last year’s Praxis group, follows a woman and a girl on one life-changing night.

Ciccoritti has also optioned a book called Jane, ‘about the fact that every woman in the world is called Jane,’ which he envisions as being a ‘very very experimental’ drama. ‘The book is diary entries about a woman trying to keep her distant lover. I want to create the effect of a diary on the screen.’

He is also in the process of writing a script he plans to produce called Lightning Girl ‘about a young homeless girl whose dementia manifests itself into her thinking she’s a superhero.’

‘I’m hoping to find the light in the darkness of that kind of material,’ says Ciccoritti. ‘Superheros save you, but we look at homeless people and we think they need to be saved, and here’s a girl in utter, utter darkness with the biggest heart in the world. She wants to help people.’ *