Montreal: Muse Entertainment Enterprises, Barbara Samuels of Mindless Entertainment and Australia’s largest independent TV drama production company, Beyond Simpson Le Mesurier, are developing Answered By Fire. The four-hour miniseries chronicles the experiences of Canadian and Australian police officers serving as UN peacekeepers in East Timor and the young Timorese woman they befriend. The $7-milllion coproduction (about 40% Canadian) is set against the lead-up to East Timor’s referendum on independence in 1999 and its bloody aftermath.

CBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have signed on and Muse and Beyond International will distribute internationally.

Muse’s Michael Prupas (Savage Messiah, The Many Trials of One Jane Doe) and Samuels (Black Harbour, North of 60) will exec produce with Robyn Kershaw (ABC) and Mikael Borglund of Beyond International. Shooting is slated mainly for Australia and East Timor (post in Canada), with Aussie partners Roger Le Mesurier and Roger Simpson producing.

Samuels, who based the mini on conversations with an RCMP officer who served in East Timor, will co-author the script with Australian writer Katherine Thomson (Halifax f.p.).

Samuels says she was drawn to the subject ‘because it explores the impact of humanitarian intervention in very personal terms…how the tragedy of this little island affects these two cops and the Timorese woman they befriend. It’s about people from different worlds caught up in a situation way beyond their control.’

Muse is also developing Pandora’s Closet, a 26 x 30 comedy series being coproduced with Kathy Slevin Productions of London, ON. Kathy Slevin (Due South) and James Nadler (Psi Factor, The Zack Files) are writing the Amelie-style story, aimed at teens and young adults and featuring lots of special F/X.

The series is about a busybody college student who can see all the ‘problems’ of her small community because they keep piling up in her closet. ‘She has to figure out whose problem it is and then figure out what she can do to solve the problem, all in half an hour,’ says Prupas. The show is being developed for CBC.

Muse and Bernie Zukerman of Toronto’s Indian Grove are in development on the one-hour dramatic series proposal Wonderland with writers George Walker and Dani Romain. It has support from CBC and keys on the experiences of a recent law school grad (‘Alice’) working in a big-city public defender’s office.

In other news, Hallmark Entertainment exec producer Steven Hewitt seems more than pleased with Muse’s latest TV movie, Silent Night, licensed by Global Television in Canada and Hallmark Channel in the U.S. and based on a touching and true story of a remarkable German woman who, on Christmas Eve 1944, gives shelter to a group of American GIs and a small band of German soldiers.

Silent Night was produced by Irene Litinsky and directed by Rodney Gibbons, with Eric Cayla on board as DOP. Executive producers are Hewitt, Prupas and Steven Jay Rubin. Music composer is James Gelfand and the stellar cast includes leads Linda Hamilton and Matthew Harbour, Romano Orzari as private Jimmy Rassi, Martin Neufeld as Lieutenant Hans Klosterman, Al Goulem, Mark Anthony Krupa, Michael Elkin, Cassian Bopp and James McGowan.

Muse organized a screening of Silent Night for friends and colleagues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts just before the holiday break.

Speer to grow with Cirrus

Richard Speer has joined busy production house Cirrus Communications as partner and VP. Cirrus’ 2002 production slate included four drama series, two doc series and a feature film, representing cumulative budgets of $18 million. ‘Richard will help us manage our growth, especially in the English market,’ says president Jacques Blain.

In drama, eight new episodes of Tabou II, coproduced with Sphere Media, will air on Reseau TVA in February. The new sitcom Hommes en quarantaine was scheduled to air Jan. 4 on Series +, while the eight-hour P.I. series Les Aventures tumulteuses de Jack Carter completes its four-month, high-def production phase with a 20-day leg in February. Blain says the series features ‘unique camera angles [and] a comic-book design.’ Jean-Nicolas Verreault (La Turbulence des fluides) stars as Carter, a former cop-turned-private investigator. It’s budgeted at $7.5 million and will air next fall or winter on Radio-Canada.

Ciao Bella, the house’s first English-language comedy/drama, is a double-shoot for CBC/SRC in prep for an April or May ’03 start.

Speer is also a partner in spot houses Jet Films and KissFilms. Blain’s other partners in Cirrus are producer Andre Beraud, responsible for the company’s drama and sitcom development slate, and producer Josee Vallee, responsible for financing.

Infintely Yours: The unfinished story

A few months back, with the blessing of Vent d’Est producer Bernard Lalonde, director/writer Patricia Vergeylen-Tassinari headed off to Italy armed with six rolls of Super 16mm film, art and costume props, and a billfold full of Euros (which she earned as a documentary editor) to shoot dream and flashback sequences for her debut feature film project, Infinitely Yours.

The filmmaker shot for three days on the island of Elba and returned to Montreal with footage of landscapes and a dreamlike villa.

Unfortunately, now she says she has run into so many hurdles at the funding agencies, notably Telefilm Canada, that it may be impossible to produce her low-budget film in Montreal, so she has started talking to producers in Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, and even Ireland.

Infinitely Yours is a humorous, bittersweet story of two cultures and two lovers – a woman who seeks a man to nurture her to life, and a man looking for a woman to mother and nurture him to death.

Vergeylen-Tassinari says while Telefilm turned down the project three times, The Harold Greenberg Fund (first and second draft and senior project), The Movie Network, Super Ecran, distrib Film Tonic and Quebec agency SODEC continued to back the project over its three-year development cycle. SODEC actually offered production financing on three occasions, initially for a $1.9-million budget, and later on reduced budgets of $900,000 and $575,000 (for a digital Betacam version).

Time started to run out when SODEC informed local English-language filmmakers the modest resources available for ’02/03 had been allocated to one film (The Blue Butterfly), and no additional funding was available.

The readers’ reports from Telefilm and the Greenberg Fund are a study in contrast.

One Telefilm report says, ‘Tassinari’s first film, Goodbye Federico [a Golden Sheaf winner for best short at Yorkton] achieved some notoriety perhaps because of its homage to Federico Fellini and her desire to propose herself as the female counterpart. This film is boring and lacks emotion and style.’

The Greenberg Fund readers’ reports state:

‘I think it is very much in the spirit of films like Leolo and Like Water for Chocolate where the world created is unique to the film, with the characters and structure following suit…

‘It is very infrequent that a script effectively walks the line between commercial potential, and artistic content. Infinitely Yours does it beautifully.’

SODEC filing dates, 2003/04

SODEC’S Direction generale du cinema and de la production televisuelle, in consultation with CNCT and the industry, has established a revised schedule of submission deadlines for 2003/04 production financing, screenwriting and Jeunes Createurs applications.

Applications for selective screenwriting assistance for private and independent sector productions may be filed as of Feb. 1. The filing deadline for corporate (production house) funding for dramatic feature films is March 14 (with anticipated decisions on or about April 15).

For private-sector production financing, the deadlines for dramatic French-language feature films are Jan. 27 (decisions April 3) and April 28 (June 26); English-language feature films, Feb. 24 (May 1); and minority feature film coproductions, French and English, anytime between Jan. 27 and Sept. 15. The evaluation period is approximately two months.

Independent-sector production financing: dramatic feature films, April 15 and Oct. 15; evaluation period, two months.

Deadlines for producion financing for dramatic short films are April 15 and Sept. 15; unique dramatic works destined for TV (medium-length productions and TV movies), March 14 (decisions, May 1) and Oct. 3 (Nov. 20); POV documentaries, March 14 (May 21) and Oct. 3 (Nov. 26); and documentary miniseries and series, March 31 (June 19).

In the Jeunes Createurs progam, the screenwriting submission deadlines are March 20, June 20 and Oct. 20. Filing deadlines for production financing are Feb. 1, May 1 and Oct. 1.

SODEC recently published its annual ’01/02 activity report, available at www.sodec.gouv.qc.ca.