Ocean reinvents ritual, pries into doctors’ sex lives

Halifax’s Ocean Entertainment and Toronto’s Northern Lights are championing their new documentary series Reinventing Ritual. The three one-hours are being produced for Vision TV by Ocean’s Johanna Eliot and Northern Lights’ Luc Bourgon and Ian French . A deal is pending in the U.S.

‘What we are doing in each episode is looking at a different rite of passage, the big transitional periods in one’s life, and trying to see how North Americans are handling them today,’ says director Sonya Jampolsky. ”Reinventing’ is the apt word, because most people have some historical knowledge or have some family history of rituals and they are just adapting them for the times. It is really fascinating when you start to explore ritual and what it actually is.’

While the three-parter delves into traditional rituals and rites of passage – ‘Coming of Age,’ ‘Love, Marriage, Separation and Divorce’ and ‘Birth and Death’ – Jampolsky promises some newer forms of ritual will also be explored.

‘The other thing we want to suggest to people in this series is wearing a tattoo or a piercing is also a form of ritual in a very modern-day form,’ says the director. ‘One of the things that is quite evident is corporations have decided that since institutions like the family and the church are backing off from ritual, they’ve found a place they can move in and sell it to us. The wedding is the best example of that, but there is starting to be a backlash against that and people are starting to reclaim ritual.’

The budget for the three episodes is just under $500,000, with support coming from Telefilm Canada, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, Vision, SCN, Knowledge Network and a private investor.

Jampolsky says the budget only allows for nine shoot days per episode.

Although she and Eliot are obtaining some ritual footage, they are still looking for more. They have embarked on a poster and online campaign across North America to find home videos and pictures depicting rituals people have reinvented.

‘It’s amazing what people send in,’ says Jampolsky, adding: ‘Finding divorce is really difficult.’

Another project in the works at Ocean is Forbidden Sex: When a Doctor Falls in Love, a documentary in development for CTV.

‘These are not stories about doctors who are sexual abusers, so to speak,’ says Jampolsky. ‘This will be about doctors who genuinely fall in love and have consensual sexual relations and emotional relationships with their patients. It’s really interesting stuff. What’s happening is medical organizations are under pressure to tighten their regulations and say this is never acceptable under any conditions.’

Development money has come in from Telefilm, CTV and the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund.

Jampolsky, who hopes to direct, says the Ocean team has been madly researching cases from British Columbia to Texas and all points in between. More on this as it develops.

Poets, puppets & political intrigue at Redstar

ON the heels of delivering a two-hour film to Bravo! and a pilot to Vision TV, there is still no rest for Len MacKeigan and Paul Kimball of Halifax-based Redstar Films.

To Bravo! went Julius Caesar, a filmed version of the play performed by Halifax theatre troupe Shakespeare by the Sea and directed by Evangelo Kioussis.

To Vision went a half-hour pilot for a documentary series called The Anti-Traditionalist. The pilot looks at an 18th century evangelist in Nova Scotia.

Now Redstar has turned its attention to three projects in development.

The first is Stanton T. Friedman IS Real!, a one-hour documentary about a former nuclear physicist in New Brunswick who applies his knowledge to the study of UFOs.

‘He is sometimes considered a controversial figure among other experts in the field,’ says MacKeigan. ‘He’s quite a character and he knows what he is talking about, coming from a nuclear physics background.’

MacKeigan will produce with Kimball, who is also writer/director on the doc.

Stanton has been licensed by Space: The Imagination Station and Bravo!. Working on a budget of approximately $130,000, Kimball is hoping to shoot the doc in a week at locations in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and California.

The second project in development is an adult puppet show from the mind of MacKeigan called Citadel Arms. The 13 x 30 soap-opera spoof is a coproduction with P.E.I.’s Cellar Door Productions for The Comedy Network. Gretha Rose is producing for Cellar Door.

Funding has come from from Technology P.E.I., the NSFDC, Telefilm and Comedy.

MacKeigan says don’t be fooled by the puppets and make this a family affair, because Sesame Street it ain’t!

‘It’s adult, but it’s not like South Park in that it’s not rude,’ he says. ‘It’s more about adult situations and characters. There won’t be a lot of swearing and stuff, but it is still definitely not for the kids.’

MacKeigan says he hopes to take Citadel Arms into production in fall or spring 2002.

The third project on Redstar’s ‘to do’ list is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Kimball, who is writing the adaptation and will direct, says this will be a post-modern Macbeth, full of ‘political intrigue and the descent of one man into a hell of his own making.’

He says it will be a multi-cam shoot lasting 12 days and it will be set in Nova Scotia. After all, Nova Scotia is Latin for New Scotland.

Bennett’s Messiah cometh

At St. John’s, NF-based Cine Terra-Neuve, producer Nancy Bennett has put the finishing touches on the one-hour performance documentary The Messiah from Montreal.

The doc, which had been in production since last summer, is about poet A.M. Klein, who Bennett believes was the first poet to write on Jewish themes in the English language. According to the producer, Klein was a major influence on poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen, who contributed an original song to the production.

Bennett executive produced and Ken Pittman produced. Arnold Bennett (husband to Nancy) directed.

The late Al Waxman narrates the film, one the last projects he worked on.

‘It is a very personal narration,’ says Nancy Bennett. ‘This was something he really cared about and I think he was really happy to be involved in it.’

In one scene at the end of the film, she says, Waxman’s narration becomes a performance of one of Klein’s poems. ‘It’s about genealogy and the passing of generation to generation. It is even more moving given the situation.’

The Messiah from Montreal has broadcast windows on History Television, Vision, The Learning Channel and CBC Regional. Bennett expects it to first air late spring/early summer.

Nickel fest worth every penny

The inaugural Nickel Independent Film and Video Festival takes place in St. John’s, July 12-14. The vision of Newfoundland filmmaker Roger Maunder, the festival was created primarily as a forum for Newfoundland filmmakers, but is open to filmmakers outside the province.

‘I finished a film about two months ago called It Ain’t Funny,’ says Maunder. ‘It’s a short and I was going to put it up and show it in a venue downtown somewhere, and I started talking to other filmmakers who had films they hadn’t put out yet. By the end of it we had nine or 10 films, so I started thinking that we might as well just start a festival.’

The event will be held at two St. John’s locatons: screenings of shorts and features will be held at the LSPU Hall, while the NIFCO Screening Room will serve as an ‘intimate and interactive’ space where filmmakers can interact with the audience.

Entry fee for feature films (70 minutes or over) is $20 and for shorts, $10. The deadline for all submissions is May 15.

For info: www.thenickel.homestead.com/nickel.html *