Montreal: Filming wrapped Oct. 6 after 28 days on Nuit de Noces, a romantic comedy from first-time director/writer Emile Gaudreault and production house Cinemaginaire International.

As many as 16 of Quebec’s most popular show biz personalities star in this ambitiously deployed ensemble story, expected to be the next Quebec box-office success in the summer of 2001, says Films Seville distrib Pierre Brousseau.

In Nuit de Noces, Genevieve Brouillette and Francois Morency play a happy couple whose relationship is sabotaged after they win a marriage contest and an all-expense paid honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls.

The nightmare contingent of meddlesome family and friends includes Pierrette Robitaille, Yves Jacques, Diane Lavallee, Sonia Vachon, Rene-Richard Cyr, Louisette Dussault, Gerard Poirier, Jacques Girard, Catherine Florent, Bobby Beshro and Collette Courtoid.

In one zany scene around the family dining table, a serene gay couple announces their impending marriage as the straight couple at the other end of the table erupts into bitter mutual recrimination. More heated exchanges follow when mom blurts out she has a lover, and an almost dignified dad warns, ‘Don’t judge your mother, I’ve known for years…it’s a family tradition.’

Denise Robert (Laura Cadieux 2, Stardom), the film’s producer with partner Daniel Louis, says director Gaudreault (cowriter on Louis 19) is ‘like a fish in water, born to the task….He’s really impressed me with his ability to learn so much so quickly and his [capacity] for intimacy with the actors without trespassing.’

Cinematographer Daniel Jobin (Varian’s War) used a tableside pulley setup to capture close-ups of the dining room high jinks. Jobin’s camera package included an Arriflex 535 and Fuji 500 asa film stock. Marc Brunet coscripted with Gaudreault, with additional writing credits going to Sylvie Bouchard, Cyr, Dany Laferriere, Jacques Languirand and Elise Turcotte.

Funding on the $2.8-million movie comes from Telefilm Canada, the Canadian Television Fund (lfp), sodec, Radio-Canada and Fonds Harold Greenberg.

*Trinome for docusoaps and reality TV

Trinome, producer of Pignon sur rue, Quebec’s first docusoap (in ’95), has reprised with the family chronicle Une famille commes les autres, a 26 half-hour series commissioned by Tele-Quebec. The series’ cinema-verite-style crew is led by director Paule Baillargeon, cameraman Jacques Leduc and sound recordist Marie-France De la Grave. The filmmakers had ‘the keys to the house’ as they taped more than 200 hours of family members (mom and dad in their 40s, and three kids aged 12, 15 and 18) at home, at school, with the extended family and at social outings. The show was taped over six months, with Isabelle Massicotte editing. The producers on the $1-million series, funded by the lfp, are Jean Tourangeau (Metier Policier) and Jocelyne Allard. Pierre Blais is director/co-ordinator.

Not an outfit to shy away from tough subjects, Trinome is also shooting the new reality tv mag Quelques secondes…pour la vie! The 26 half-hour series is licensed by lifestyle specialty channel Canal Vie and follows the life-and-death responsibilities of three emergency doctors at Hopital du Sacre-Coeur in Montreal and a team of six ambulance technicians.

Pierre-Paul Lariviere, Trinome’s director of post-production, is the show’s producer.

The house is also producing 2 Femmes du sable et des kilometres for Canal Vie, a doc-style chronicle of two women entered in the Sahara Desert car rally, Trophee Aicha des gazelles.

It was shot in France, Spain and Morocco by director/producer Blais. Tourangeau says he hopes two sporting women representing English Canada will raise the rally flag in the future.

Trinome is prepping its first docudrama – ‘true stories dramatized’ – series (22 half-hours) for Reseau tva, and is developing a youth drama series, 11 Somerset (13 half-hours), with writers Pierre Billon, Stanley Pean and Sonia Sarsati. Telefilm Canada and Tele-Quebec are providing funding.

*Cowan’s essay on porn

Noted documentary filmmaker Paul Cowan’s latest is Give Me Your Soul, an 80-minute voyage into the strange world and people of the booming u.s. pornography industry.

Adam Symansky produced with Cowan for the National Film Board’s Documentary East studio and exec producer Sally Bochner. Symansky says Cowan originally wanted to do a thoughtful film about sex and censorship, but the censorship experts were a little too boring, and as shooting progressed, the thing that really stood out were the people on the front lines of the porn business. People like Katie who gets on a Greyhound bus in Tennessee and heads off to l.a. to become a porn star, or her pathetic mom Dolly, who proudly displays fading childhood snaps of Katie decked out like some kind of baby sexpot.

There’s the predictable array of sleazy producers and agents, conflicted performers looking for their big shot at stardom, and the just plain weird, guys like Luke, described as a ‘troubled convert to Orthodox Judaism who hosts one website on ethics and another on the porn trade.’

Much of the film’s action centres on the biz in l.a., the uncontested world production capital for the $8-billion-a-year industry.

Hannele Halm took about nine months to edit the doc down from two six-hour reels, reduced from an amazing 80 hours of original videotape.

Cowan, one of only three nfb English Program directors on staff, directed, wrote and shot Give Me Your Soul, which is slated to hit the international festival circuit after its premiere Oct. 29 on CBC Newsworld’s The Passionate Eye Sunday Showcase.

The budget is about $560,000.

Symansky and Doc East are also in production on director Yves Dion’s feature-length Promised Land, a seven-year chronicle of the lives of two refugee families slated for editing next winter/spring, as well as on Exile, a new project from director Don McWilliams, author of the definitive Norman McLaren biography. The latter project is a mixed-media coproduction with the nfb’s animation studio and is a highly original, modern exploration of the widely felt experience of exile. The anticipated release is fall 2001.

An ambitious international coproduction on ‘the history of money’ is also being sorted out, and if all comes together, it could go into production next spring. *