Montreal: Lots of high-level European coproduction action at Transfilm this summer, with two projects in front of the cameras, the Gerard Pires (Taxi) action film Heist and Yves Simoneau’s historical blockbuster miniseries Napoleon, and a third project, Carole Giacobbi’s comedy thriller Polyesterday, slated to shoot here this fall.

Heist, a Mark Ezra story about extreme sport types on the criminal fringe, stars Stephen Dorff, Natasha Henstridge, Bruce Payne and Steven Berkoff. It’s been filming on location in Montreal over the past 12 weeks, and is a triparite coproduction between Claude Leger of Transfilm, Jason Piette, Michael Cowan and Jonathan Vanger of the U.K.’s Spice Factory, and Eric and Nicolas Altmayer of France’s Mandarin.

Remstar Distribution holds Canadian rights to the $19-million film. Miramax Films has the U.S. and TF1 International has international.

Director Simoneau (Nuremberg, Free Money) and DOP Guy Dufaux are in Europe (France, Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria) for 22 weeks filming the eight-hour, $57-million historical drama Napoleon. Leger’s Euro coproducers, Jean-Pierre Guerin and Veronique Marchat of GMT Productions and the U.K.’s Spice Factory, are especially pleased with Simoneau’s participation.

The director has recruited some of his home-side regulars for the occasion, picture editor Yves Langlois and music composer Richard Gregoire.

The show is being alternately shot in French and English and has an all-star cast, led by Christian Clavier in the title role, John Malkovich, Gerard Depardieu, Isabella Rossellini, Guillaume Depardieu and Anouk Aimee as well as Canadian actors Jessica Pare, David LaHaye, Yves Jacques, Serge Dupire, Rock Lafortune, Richard Groulx and Albert Millaire.

Mark Sorella, Transfilm director of business and legal affairs, reports Napoleon has been licensed by A&E Networks in the U.S., Kirchmedia in Germany, France 2 in France and RAI in Italy.

Polyesterday is an $11-million Canada/Euro coproduction between Transfilm and Richard Sadler of Montreal’s Film Stock International and producers Michelle Giacobbi of France and Christopher Milburn of the U.K. It’s described as a thriller with funny, sexy and violent relief.

Good results for Lost Junction

Neve Campbell (Scream, Panic) and Billy Burke (Along Came A Spider, Wonderland) star in the new Peter Masterton (Convicts, Red Blood, The Trip to Bountiful) feature film drama Lost Junction, which wrapped principal photography here after a 25-day shoot. The film is produced by Michael Mailer and Daniel Bigel of New York’s Bigel/Mailer Films. Tom Luse is the supervising producer.

In Lost Junction, Campbell’s character is a suspect in her husband’s murder. She complicates matters by running off to New Orleans, taking along hubbie’s money and a man with his own past, played by Burke.

From his Tribeca office, Mailer, son of famous author Norman Mailer, says the tight preproduction schedule was tough, but then everything fell nicely into place. ‘Essentially everyone [in the STCVQ crew] was great, and Peter was quite impressed with the local talent pool [ACTRA].’

Special kudos go to Nick Barker of the Montreal Film Commission. ‘Nick was instrumental in our decision to shoot in Montreal,’ adds the producer.

The Montreal crew included DOP Tom Burstyn, production designer John Meighen, art director David Blanchard and UPM Micheline Garant. Rushes were handled by Covitec/ Technicolor.

Launched in 1995, Bigel/Mailer exec produced James Toback’s dark comedy feature Two Girls and a Guy, released by Twentieth Century Fox Searchlight Pictures, as well as Toback’s free-style outing Black and White, a drama about a group of privileged Manhattan private school kids and their reckless fascination with uptown hip-hop culture. That film was financed by Chris Blackwell’s Palm Pictures and released nationally last year by Sony Screen Gems.

Other Bigel/Mailer movies include The Last Producer, directed and starring Burt Reynolds, and licensed to USA Network; Toback’s Harvard Man, a coming-of-age story set on a college campus and shot in Boston and Toronto in 2000; the recently wrapped Empire, the story of the rise and fall of a Latino hustler written and directed by newcomer Franc Reyes; Casanova Falling and The Money Shot.

Projects in development (www. bigelmailer.com) include the neo-noir drama The Night Job, with Dennis Hopper slated to direct, and the Fox Family Channel movie The Mario Andretti Story.

Bigel/Mailer has a non-exclusive remake deal for a number of RKO Pictures classics, including Clash by Night and Age of Consent, and Mailer says he’s definitely open to coventure opportunities with Canada in the future.

Super Banff for Diversus

Barely past the tender age of three, Diversus Productions has a solid lineup of highly probable projects in development and financing.

The house reports an excellent Banff Television Festival, where it pitched the MOW/companion doc Code Brothers, a doc series called Women Warriors, the one-hour biography Irving Layton: Red Carpet for the Soul and a doc on community radio in South Africa called Radio for Change, which has already received $70,000 in financing from CIDA.

Code Brothers is the remarkable, true-life, turn-of-century story of two Onondaga brothers (from the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, ON) who become special mission spies for the British Army during WWI.

Rosanna Roth, the film’s producer and company VP sales and acquisitions, says there’s real interest on the part of two of the three national TV networks, and from program director Jim Compton at APTN, which is looking at a second-window licence.

Roth wants the project to include a museum/touring component, a Heritage Minute spin-off and a companion documentary, an idea CTV is encouraging as part of its Canadian TV movie stream.

The 13-part series Women Warriors lays to rest any notion of ‘the weaker sex,’ with profiles of women beefing up, embracing combat and contact sports and just plain coming out swinging. Roth says WTSN has an option on a first window, with interest from WTN and CBC. She’s looking for a French-track coproducer and international sales.

Diversus also has exclusive rights to The Adalbert Lallier Story, a one-hour documentary investigation into the consequences of the former Concordia University poli-sci and economics professor’s confession to membership in the brutal Waffen SS.

The doc asks why Lallier felt compelled to reveal his Nazi past and subsequently hunt down his former commanding officer, Julius Viel, the last man formally charged with war crimes in Germany. Alliance Atlantis and History Television are among the interested parties, says Roth.

The house has produced two primetime docs: the 90-minute Schmelvis: Elvis is Jewish (And Nobody Cares), described as an off-beat look at the King’s ‘real-life Jewish ancestry,’ sold to Bravo!, Citytv and Keshet in Israel; and Too Colorful for the League, a one-hour cinema verite-style historical expose of what is described as pro hockey’s shameful and longstanding ‘whites only’ tendancy.

Diversus was launched in 1998 by president Ari Cohen and VP Evan Beloff. *