Montreal: Lots of drama and factual production is planned for production house Point de Mire this season, including 30 one-hour episodes of the Reseau TVA teleroman Emma III and 10 hours of the new Radio-Canada series La Grande Ourse.

La Grande Ourse is billed as Quebec’s first primetime fantasy melodrama, a cross between the supernaturalism of The X-Files and the small-town creepiness of Twin Peaks, says PDM producer Raymond Gauthier.

Grande Ourse, which translates as both ‘Big Bear,’ the name of the small village, and starry ‘Big Dipper,’ is budgeted at a cool $8 million, with funding from the Licence Fee Program and Telefilm Canada. INIS film school graduate and screenwriter Frederic Ouellet developed the project over four years. One of Quebec primetime’s hottest directors, Patrice Sauve (La Vie, la vie), will direct a cast featuring lead Marc Messier. Andre Monette is producing and Jean-Francois Messier is exec producer. With encouragement from the local film commission, the series shoots in and around Argenteuil, QC (also the locale for the Richard Donner feature Timeline) from July 3 to Nov. 30.

The exceptional 30-hour order for Emma, budgeted at $6 million, is typical of private broadcasters wanting-ever longer runs, says Gauthier. Elyse Guilbeault stars as Emma, an artist who leaves family behind to devote herself to her muse, and Patrice Godin, in the role of a doctor and Emma’s lover. The series is scripted by Daniele Trottier and directed by Stephan Joly. PDM will have 81 hours of Emma in the can by season’s end, bringing the 10-year-old house’s primetime drama total to 300 hours. Some 45 projects are in development, adds Gauthier.

PDM is also active in factual programming, with 20 hours slated for production in 2002/03 and another 10 to 15 hours in development.

The house is producing 10 new profiles for Canal Vie’s benchmark Biographies series; the 90-minute variety special Trenet au Canada, a service job for producer Juste Pour Rire and broadcasters SRC (a five-year licence) and ARTV (one broadcast); and a one-hour profile of social activist Heidi Ratjen for W Network (the former WTN) and Canal Vie.

PDM producer/writer Pierre Brochu is directing a 90-minute SRC variety special called Gilles Vigneault: Le Voyageur sedentaire on a budget of $360,000. Also in production is Sol (3 x 2 hours) for ARTV.

Major projects in development include In the Wake of Discovery, a four-hour, high-end history of explorers, with support from Historia and History Television, as told from the POV of the explorers – Frobisher, La Verendrye, Marquette and Joliette and Simon Fraser. The aim is to shoot this fall on a budget in the $2-million range, hopefully with French coproduction partners.

PDM was founded in 1992 by president/writer Lise Payette, Gauthier and Messier. Senior producers include Monette, Brochu and Martin Metivier, who handles factual magazines and client relations.

Developments at Adobe

Known for his serious commitment to international social causes and human rights with projects like double Gemini nominee Rainmakers, Robbie Hart of Adobe Productions is also a passionate devotee of baseball and the Montreal Expos. Hart is rather disturbed that the franchise faces the looming threat of contraction at the end of the current season.

In Nos Amours, a new English and French 70-minute documentary sold to The Passionate Eye on CBC Newsworld and to Radio-Canada and sister service RDI, Hart uses live action, archives and fan testimonials to chronicle more than 30 years of Major League Baseball in Montreal. Among those profiled on-camera is the less-than-partial director himself (‘I first fell in love with the Expos when I was 10 years old’) in a demonstration of pure POV doc-making.

Taping on the project started three years ago when ‘Pos’ fans had hopes of a shiny new open-air downtown ballpark. Instead, the faithful were subjected to the sleazy machinations of a divided ownership group, culminating in the MLB’s failed attempt last fall to pull the plug on both the Montreal and Minnesota Twins franchises. ‘Major League Baseball is definitely sick,’ says Hart, although he claims the Expos story is not over yet, ‘and we can expect the unexpected.’

Expos’ diehards profiled in Nos Amours include journalist and former PQ cabinet minister Claude Charron, longtime season ticket holder Katie Hynes and wily pitching ace Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee.

Nos Amours is budgeted at $225,000, with support from the LFP, SODEC and the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund.

This year, Adobe’s Luc Cote and Hart are directing and producing the one-hour doc Daring to Dream, a chronicle of seven street kids from all over the world who land in Quebec as participants in the Cirque du Soleil-sponsored Cirque du Monde project. Filming is taking place in Holland, Chile, Burkino Faso, South Africa and Canada, counterpointing the kids’ experience with the Cirque in Montreal with flashback sequences filmed in their countries of origin. Daring to Dream has been presold to SRC, TFO and Life Network.

Adobe is also developing a three-hour doc series called We’re All Hooked, a comparative examination of the international phenomenon of drug culture. Hart anticipates a spring 2004 delivery, with development support on the $400,000 project from Newsworld and Tele-Quebec.

Hart says the ability to think, write, shoot and deliver in both French and English gives Adobe a distinctly competitive Canadian edge.

U.S. dates for Maelstrom

Denis Villeneuve’s second feature Maelstrom, best picture winner at both the Genie Awards and the Prix Jutra, is the subject of an extended 2002 U.S. theatrical tour. Produced by Roger Frappier and Luc Vandal of Max Films, Maelstrom has screened in 24 cities, including New York, Washington and Los Angeles, since January.

According to U.S. distrib Arrow Entertainment, the opening weekend gross in L.A. on one screen (in April) was a highly respectable $4,800, $8,400 for the full week.

The film scored the cover of the L.A. Times arts and entertainment supplement, and positive reviews in the no-nonsense New York Post and in Newsday. Stephen Holden in The New York Times writes, ‘…this fine French Canadian film [with its] iconoclast mixture of elements is a courageous attempt to ambush us by tearing through the surfaces of Bibi’s life to conjure the gnarly essence of what lies beneath.’

Stateside, Maelstrom has preemed at festivals in Providence, Madison, Wisconsin, Palm Beach and this month at the Half Way to Hollywood Film Festival in Mission, KS. The exporter is Alliance Atlantis Pictures International.

More film action

New film action as reported by the STCVQ includes the Productions Tele-Action crime drama (a double-shoot) The Last Chapter II/Le Dernier Chapitre II, shooting from June 10 through to mid-October. Richard Roy again directs for producers Claudio Luca and Martine Allard.

The Kalagou Films feature Polyesterday shoots on location in Quebec May 16 to late June. It’s a U.K. coproduction from producer/director Michele Giacobbi, producer Jean-Marc Felio and Transfilm producer Claude Leger (Napoleon). Genie-winning DOP Pierre Gill (Lost and Delirious) is the cinematographer. Francois Seguin is production designer and Martin Gendron is the art director.

Steven Schachter’s The Dog Walker, from V.Z.S. Production and producers Peter Sadowski and Randy Sutter, is shooting here May 5-31.

The CineGroupe live-action series Seriously Weird (aka Strange Tales) shoots May 21 to late November. Christian Gagne is producing with PM Francois Dufour.

Principal photography wrapped May 10 on Wicked Minds, the third in a slate of five JB Media made-for-TV movies. The film is produced in association with Astral Television Networks and Hearst Entertainment (international rights) and stars Angie Everhart and Canadian actors Andrew Walker, Winston Rekert and Amy Sloan.

The story is billed as a sexy thriller about a young college dude who returns home to discover pops has taken up with a much younger woman. A passionate affair ensues until the old boy is murdered. Jason Hreno directed, Josee Mauffette produced and Jean Bureau and Anne Carlucci exec produced.

Wicked Minds is slated to preem on The Movie Network, Super Ecran and Movie Central. JB Media, production affiliate of distrib Incendo Media, has Canadian, U.S. and French Euro and African distribution rights.

The first two JB Media entries, shot since last fall, are The Rendering, starring Shannen Doherty, and Guilt By Association, with Academy Award winner Mercedes Ruhl.