Montreal: As part of its fall festival program, the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris has organized a six-week tribute to Canadian director David Cronenberg. The program includes screenings, interviews with the director and an exhibit of artifacts from Cronenberg’s avant-garde and often gruesome movies. Other screenings and tributes to Cronenberg have been organized by French tv network Canal + and the authoritative magazine Cahiers du Cinema. The tribute runs to Dec. 16.

In Paris for the tributes, Cronenberg (eXistenZ, Crash, Naked Lunch, The Fly, Videodrome) confirmed he will direct the $70-million sequel Basic Instinct ii, starring Sharon Stone. According to an afp wire story out of Paris, principal photography on Basic Instinct ii is slated to begin in February, with location and studio shooting anticipated for New York and Toronto or Mexico.

National Film Board documentarian Catherine Fol has won first prize/best of festival for her film on the evolution of the universe, Le Lien cosmique, at the Biennale International de Cinema Scientific in Spain.

Filmmaker Robert Lepage has won the special jury prize at the Madrid Festival of Experimental Cinema for his latest feature Possible Worlds. Other Canadian films screened in Madrid include Michael Snow’s Prelude, Garine Torossian’s Red Brick, Atom Egoyan’s The Line, Korion Berg’s ASCII Alphabet and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s Comment Filmer Dieu.

Denys Arcand’s fashion world satire Stardom is the only Canadian film selected for screening at this month’s London International Film Festival. The film was coproduced by Cinemaginaire International, Serendipity Point Films and France’s Cine b and was released on 30 screens in France on Nov. 22. *