If you just can’t say no to a movie billed as ‘three stories of yearning and loneliness’ you will surely tune in to The Movie Network and Movie Central in March for Three and a Half, the latest of several downbeat films in the works at Toronto’s Summer Pictures.

Distributor BV International Pictures of Norway is currently chasing sales in the U.K., France and Australia for the Boris Mojsovski (Symphony, Stop) feature – shot in 2001 with Telefilm Canada money – and a limited release is expected in Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City before spring. Tom Strnad, who co-owns Summer with Mojsovski, produces.

The picture stars Valerie Buhagiar, Matthew Ferguson and Dragana Varagic as artists who meet three fictional characters they created on the subway.

Strnad is also busy cutting At the Corner of the Eye, 13 minutes by Ryan Redford wherein a man (Pete Stevens) is haunted by the voice of a child he squished with his car. Post on the $45,000 short should conclude next month, after which Corner goes on the festival circuit starting, it is hoped, at Cannes. Grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Film Board paid the bills.

If those don’t kill your buzz, watch for Pictures, a feature drama about a Canadian photojournalist and the horrors of war in the former Yugoslavia. Mojsovski and his dad, cinematographer Levko Mojsovski, who also lensed Three and a Half, will shoot this summer in Toronto, Quebec and eastern Europe either this summer or fall on a $3-million to $4-million budget. Development cash came from The Harold Greenberg Fund and Telefilm, and Summer will again hit up both for production funds.

No word yet on cast or distributor, but Strnad expects to secure a deal shortly after the younger Mojsovski delivers the script in February.

Depending on funding and schedules, Summer might also fast-track Svjetlana Jaklenec’s The Fall Guide. The script, about an elderly widow who lives next to a house of rowdy college girls, is still in early development, but Strnad thinks Jaklenec (The Quarry) could take it to camera with $500,000 before the credits roll on 2003.

Summer also has two features penciled in for 2004 – A Boat So Small In a Sea So Wide, about a drowning, and (finally!) a comedy called Too Many Men on the Ice. Doug Mackay is writing the first draft of Men and is expected to codirect with Boris Mojsovski.

The reel thing

Contrary to what you might have read elsewhere, the Real to Reel Productions and CTV project about country singer Ronnie Hawkins is not a reality series like The Osbournes. And, thus, the Canadian viewing public heaves a collective sigh of relief. It’s a one-hour doc about the music legend, his kin, and his recent bout with cancer.

Real to Reel’s Anne Pick (The Bunny Years) is now shooting with codirector and DOP Dennis Beauchamp (Junkyard Wars) at the Hawkins spread near Peterborough, ON with $650,000 of private and CTV funding.

Real to Reel will then get political with Helen’s War: Portrait of a Dissident, Canada’s first documentary coproduction with Australia. The one-hour by director Anna Broinowski will spotlight the life and work of noted Aussie peacenik Helen Caldicott, best known for her 1982 turn in the National Film Board anti-nuke short If You Love This Planet. The 50/50 copro will run $540,000, most of it from CBC’s Passionate Eye, the Independent Film Channel and SBS in Australia. DOP Mike Grippo is in talks and Greg West will edit.

The Toronto company has two other curiously titled projects lined up for summer. Spidermen – a mid-six-figure 2 x 60 doc special about high-altitude maintenance workers – will shoot across Canada and the U.S. with Anne Hainsworth at the helm, while Pick codirects, with DOP Daithi Connaughton, a 90-minute doc about Irish peace workers called The Fellowship.

Will 2004 see docs such as, oh, I don’t know… The Bulk? The Three Towers?

Awww, shucks

Here’s a pitch for you: Best in Show, but with shellfish instead of dogs. That is perhaps the best way to describe That Shuckin’ Flic, a mockumentary expected to shoot this summer in Nova Scotia, courtesy of Toronto’s Novario Productions.

Budgeted at an even $1 million, penned and coproduced by Peter Campbell (The Cask), it follows the exploits of oddball East Coasters at a scallop-shucking festival. Coproducer Kevin Kincaid is working on a Telefilm Canada application and distribution deal.

Kincaid also stars in the medical drama Here Today, Here Tomorrow? for director Charles Wahl (Coffee Shop). It is hoped that the $20,000 10-minute short, set at a busy Toronto hospital, can be turned into a pilot and possible series, says coproducer Campbell. Shooting runs through January and February, and is followed by I Ain’t Ringin’ It, a comic monologue about the experiences of a young altar boy. The short’s $8,000 budget is backed by Telefilm and shoots in Toronto this spring.