This year, six notable Canadian films are up for the Best Motion Picture Genie. They are Love Come Down, Maelstrom, New Waterford Girl, Possible Worlds, Stardom, and To Walk With Lions. The dope on the contenders follows.

*Love Come Down

Clement Virgo is on an up with Love Come Down. The film is in the running for nine Genie Awards, including the coveted best picture prize.

The urban drama, produced by Virgo’s Conquering Lion Pictures and The Film Works, both of Toronto, is about two brothers, one black, the other white, who look after each other in the absence of their father, who was murdered by their mother.

Love Come Down is based on Virgo’s 1993 short film Save My Lost Nigga Soul, which took the best short film prize at the Toronto International Film Festival that year. From the outset, Virgo and his partner in Conquering Lion, Damon D’Oliveira, hoped to make the short into a feature.

Eric Jordan of Film Works was no stranger to Virgo when he agreed to come on board Love Come Down as a producer. He and the writer/director had worked together on The Planet of Junior Brown in 1997. Jordan says he was immediately impressed with the screenplay and Virgo’s ideas for the latest film.

‘What really struck me, although I had seen the short a few times, was the originality of the conception of the film,’ says Jordan.

He believes the film, which was shot in Toronto in late 1999, says a great deal about Canadian multiculturalism, without having the quiet theme rubbed in the viewer’s face.

‘It is a film that mixes races, genders, religions in a way that is very Toronto and very exciting,’ says Jordan. ‘Many of the characters are of mixed heritage, which is the way things are going. It really reflects that in an honest way, strictly on a personal level, as opposed to the American market where you can’t have people of different colors in the same film without the film being about that.’

Love Come Down was financed by Telefilm Canada, TMN-The Movie Network, the Harold Greenberg Fund, and tax credits, with distribution advances from UTV International, Equinox Entertainment and Unipix Entertainment. It made its world premier at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and has been touring the international festival circuit.

Equinox will release Love Come Down across Canada in mid-March 2001. Dustin Dinoff

*Maelstrom

As cinematic guiding voices go, Maelstrom’s fish-narrator has to be right up there with American Beauty’s storytelling corpse.

The film, about a young woman whose life spirals out of control after she is involved in a hit-and-run and who finally takes responsibility by confronting the victim’s family, also has another side, says director/writer Denis Villeneuve, and the fish is the least of it. ‘One of its subjects is mythology. There’s a strange narrator telling the story from a fantasy world. It’s a hyper-realistic film, but it goes very close to fantasy at some points.’

Even before its best picture Genie nomination, Maelstrom, produced by Roger Frappier and Luc Vandal of Montreal’s Max Films, has been showered with accolades: it opened the Perspective Canada series at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. ‘It’s very important [for a French-language film to headline Perspective Canada],’ said Villeneuve at the time of the festival. ‘Because of the language barrier, very often the French movies don’t get into the rest of Canada.’

Since then, Maelstrom has been chosen as Canada’s official entry in the best foreign-language film category at the upcoming Academy Awards – an honor Villeneuve also had in 1998 with his film 32 August On Earth – beating out nine other Quebec films.

Aside from the Oscar effort, Maelstrom also recently swept some of the higher-profile awards at the 2000 Montreal World Film Festival. The film won in the categories of best Canadian film, the audience choice award and best artistic contribution (cinematography). It also won a special mention from the best Canadian film jury at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival.

Alliance Atlantis Pictures International is the global distributor, with Odeon Films distributing the film in English Canada and Alliance Atlantis/Vivafilm in Quebec.

Funding came from sodec, Telefilm Canada and Tele-Quebec. *

Fiona MacDonald

*New Waterford Girl

New Waterford Girl’s critical success has landed the film in the pool vying for best film at the 2001 Genie Awards. Coproduced by Toronto’s Sienna Films and Halifax’s imX communications, the low-budget New Waterford Girl is in contention for the biggest prize in Canadian cinema after what Sienna producers Jennifer Kawaja and Julia Sereny consider a banner year for indigenous film.

‘I think there are so many talented people here making really good movies and it raises the bar for all of us,’ says Sereny. ‘The more good movies that are out there, the more challenged we are to push ourselves to make better movies. As producers, it is really exciting.’

Directed by Allan Moyle and written by Tricia Fish, New Waterford Girl is set in the Cape Breton town of New Waterford and tells the story of a pair of teenagers stuck in the backwater who help each other fulfill their dreams. According to producer Kawaja, she and Sereny were immediately taken with Fish’s story.

‘Julia and I read the script when Tricia was shopping around for producers,’ recalls Kawaja. ‘We fell in love with it, optioned it and began working with Chris Zimmer at imX on the project.’

Zimmer had been a supporter of Fish’s and was reportedly anxious to be part of the team involved.

Moyle (Pump Up the Volume), apparently equally excited by Fish’s words, quickly snapped up the position of director.

‘He read it quickly, called us back and told us why he loved it,’ says Kawaja. ‘It was good because it is the kind of script a lot of directors don’t want to direct. It is not a high-stakes script. A lot of movies like New Waterford, which is very much a character-driven piece, can be challenging.’

Backed financially by the Harold Greenberg Fund, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, Telefilm Canada, TMN-The Movie Network, cbc and a distribution advance from Alliance Atlantis, the film was shot on Cape Breton Island, which caused a few problems in production.

‘Shooting in Cape Breton is kind of like shooting in a remote location,’ says Sereny. ‘Many of our cast did come from there and so did some of the crew. But all of the keys and equipment and vehicles had to be brought in. On a small budget it is an enormous strain.’

With the experience behind them, producers Sereny and Kawaja are undoubtedly pleased with the company they are keeping on the list of Genie nominees. Dustin Dinoff

*Possible Worlds

An interesting footnote to keep in mind when taking in a screening of the Genie-nominated film Possible Worlds is that it started out as a stage play. That is how East Side Film Company producer Sandra Cunningham first became aware of John Mighton’s stage production in 1997. After seeing the play, she knew Mighton’s story of a murdered man who experiences a number of different realities, all of which feature his lover Joyce, was a smart horse to bet on and approached Mighton about adapting it for the big screen. The idea appealed so much, Mighton asked to write the screenplay.

As behind-the-scenes development work began on the film version, the play toured and landed in Quebec City for a run. As fate would have it, another key element to the embryonic feature found his way into the theatre one night.

‘Robert Lepage saw it and approached us, saying he was very interested in making it into a movie,’ says Cunningham. ‘I believe at the time he had no idea there were plans to make it into a movie already. It was serendipitous. The ideas John [Mighton] puts forth [in Possible Worlds] are very in line with some of the preoccupations of Robert Lepage, artistically and intellectually. He immediately felt that John was someone who shared a common language in which to discuss these things.’

Lepage, who according to Cunningham rarely works on other people’s ideas, was a major coup for East Side. Not only were she and Mighton recruiting a respected director, they were also scoring his film company, In Extremis Images, as a production partner in Montreal, where some of the film was shot.

Cunningham says the text remained relatively true to the play, at the request of director Lepage.

‘What is incredibly different [in the film versus the play] is the rhythm, tone and the incredible leap between a cerebral piece on stage, going between one reality and another, and then trying to visualize it,’ says Cunningham. ‘I think one of the major challenges was the need to visualize parallel realities in a very non-surrealist and non-sci-fi kind of way.’

Possible Worlds was financed by Telefilm Canada, sodec, TMN-The Movie Network, the ctf, a cbc broadcast licence and a distribution advance from Alliance Atlantis. It made its world premier earlier this year at the Venice International Film Festival, before traveling to the Toronto International Film Festival for a special screening.

Cunningham says she has been very encouraged by the reaction of audiences.

‘The audience is listening,’ says Cunningham. You can hear a pin drop and people laugh at all the right moments. I love it.’

Possible Worlds opens in theatres in January. Dustin Dinoff

*Stardom

Denise Robert, producer of the Genie-nominated Stardom, was involved from the beginning at the request of the film’s director/cowriter Denys Arcand, who was acquainted with her work as a producer through his involvement in Montreal Sextet in 1992.

The project came about through Serendipity Point Films’ Robert Lantos’ determination to make an Arcand movie. ‘Denys negotiated that he should have a producer and he asked for me,’ Robert explains.

‘Stardom represents about five years of our lives,’ she says. ‘It went through various stages. It came to me when it was at the idea stage; the script was not written yet.’

The story changed direction many times, morphing from one that looked at beauty ‘and the effect of beauty on our society’ to its final, broader concept. ‘It developed a lot,’ recalls Robert. ‘It evolved into a reflection on television, on the effect of television on our society, and the whole storyline of beauty became more of a subplot.’

And reaction to the finished film?

‘All I can say is that Denys Arcand made the movie he wanted to make,’ says Robert.

‘The film’s got a lot of visibility. Being the first Canadian film ever to close Cannes was a tremendous honor and achievement. And it opened the Toronto International Film Festival. It was a huge success; it got tremendous sales at Cannes.

‘The film is very complex in some ways. Some people look at it and immediately see all the different levels or reflections in the film. If they are just looking at the story of the girl they might not get the satisfaction of looking at what Denys is doing with the role of media in life, in society.

‘Denys Arcand is happy with the movie.

‘We’ve had some terrific reviews. His experience of his movies is that they are loved passionately or detested passionately. He doesn’t try to make movies that have consensus. He tries to create movies that [spark] debate,’ says Robert.

Robert has two projects coming up. La Repetition, a coprod with France shot in Paris, starring Emmanuelle Beart, is in post, with release scheduled in time for the Cannes 2001 festival. The other, Nuits de Noce, a comedy, is set for a summer 2001 theatrical release.

The $12-million Stardom is a coproduction between Toronto’s Serendipity, Montreal’s Cinemaginaire and France’s Cine b.

Financing came from Telefilm Canada, sodec, TMN-The Movie Network, and provincial (Ontario and Quebec) and federal tax credits.

The film opened theatrically in Canada and the u.s. in late October. Distributors include Alliance Atlantis (Canada), Lions Gate (u.s.), Pathe International (France) and Momentum Pictures (u.k.). * Fiona MacDonald

*To Walk With Lions

Tony Fitzjohn was mostly directionless when his vocation came up and hit him. The subject of the Genie-nominated To Walk With Lions was bumming around Africa in the late ’80s, when he was hired as an assistant by George Adamsom, familiar to aficionados of Born Free.

Inspired not out of any love for animals but because he needed the money, the twentysomething Brit entered the world of the celebrity animal savior, then involved in taking lions that had been in zoos and ‘getting them used to going back in the wild’ before setting them free, says Lions producer Julie Allan. ‘And he was seduced into the life.’

Right around this time, action against animals was stepped up. ‘The tenor changed,’ says Allan. ‘The poaching became worse and the lions were being poisoned [so the land could be cultivated]. George Adamson was eventually killed by a poacher, and it changed Tony’s life. It really was Tony’s redemption. Now Tony has his own animal reserve in Tanzania.’

Allan produced the film with Pieter Kroonenburg, under the auspices of their company Kingsborough Greenlight, with the involvement of British and Kenyan coproduction partners. The film stars Richard Harris as Adams and was shot 200 miles north of Nairobi on an animal reserve.

Allan spoke from Holland where she and Kroonenburg are in the midst of preproduction on their next movie, Ocean Warrior, coincidentally also an ‘action adventure with some kind of message,’ this time about the work of Canadian environmentalist Paul Watson.

‘Paul Watson has an organization called the Sea Shepherd. He broke away from Greenpeace and he goes around the world stopping people killing whales. It’s a true-life story,’ explains Allan.

Studio work on the shoot is scheduled to start at the beginning of February, with ocean filming to be done in Malta.

‘I’m thrilled, it’s a terrific honor,’ says Allan of the nomination. ‘I think there’s a bunch of terrific films in there. It’s a great honor.’ Fiona MacDonald