Montreal: Shooting is underway in Quebec City on director Robert Lepage’s fifth feature, La Face cachee de la lune, adapted from his critically acclaimed stage play. The film shoots in HD format over 20-plus days through to the end of the month, with additional dates scheduled in early March.

First mounted at the Trident theatre in Quebec City in March 2000, La Face cachee is one of the director’s most personal and cinematographic works, counterpointing dialogue between two brothers, who have recently lost their mother, against the backdrop of human creativity and the space race between the U.S. and the USSR. The play has been presented in some 40 cities in North America, Europe and Australia, winning kudos for best play and best director in the U.K. in 2001.

Cast includes Lepage in a leading role alongside his regulars Anne-Marie Cadieux and Richard Frechette. Gemini nominee Celine Bonnier (The Last Chapter) also stars.

La Face cachee is produced by In Extremis Images and Media Principia and is the third Lepage (Le Confessionnal, Possible Worlds) play to be adapted for the big screen, following Le Polygraphe and No.

Tremblay scripts first series

Playwright Michel Tremblay’s initial foray into dramatic TV writing is Le Coeur decouvert, a 13-hour ‘teleroman-plus’ style series produced by Caroline Heroux of Communications Claude Heroux Plus and airing on Radio-Canada. Industry veteran and Heroux’s dad, Claude Heroux, is the show’s exec producer.

Le Coeur decouvert chronicles the day-to-day lives of three gay couples who share a condo triplex, the primary pairing – a fortysomething university professor played by Gilles Renaud and an actor played by Michel Poirier – being two men going through major life and career changes. Living above and below are two lesbian couples, played by accomplished actors Adele Reinhardt and Daniele Lorain and Louise Latraverse and Muriel Dutil. Micheline Lanctot, Huguette Oligny, Janine Sutto, Marie Tito, Charles-Andre Bourassa and Donald Pilon are also featured.

Tremblay says the goal of Le Coeur decouvert isn’t so much to explore homosexual relations as human relationships. At any rate, the show is definitely not a Quebecois version of the edgy Showcase Television series Queer as Folk.

Gilbert Lepage is the director. Francois Lamontagne is the art director. Costume designer Francois Barbeau was assisted by Hughette Gagne and Michel F. Cote wrote the original music.

Le Coeur decouvert, budgeted at $3.1 million, is a typical midrange Quebec primetime drama, sometimes referred to as a teleroman-plus. These shows are characterized by extended broadcast runs, the use of exterior locations but with considerably reduced production crews, and are originated in video or DV formats.

Other new ’02/03 SRC series in this category include Rumeurs (Sphere Media), 26 half-hours scripted by youth series writer Isabelle Langlois and budgeted at $4.4 million, and the sitcom Le Plateau (MaxFilms Television), 26 half-hours scripted by actor Ken Scott and budgeted at $2.8 million.

The landmark Tremblay play Les Belles-Soeurs has been adapted for the big screen and is currently in preproduction with Cite-Amerique under the direction of John N. Smith (Random Passage).

Pixcom series a ratings hit on France 3

The Pixcom Productions doc series A Species Odyssey drew a national network audience of close to nine million, or a 34% market share, on France 3 earlier this month, says producer Nicola Merola, the company’s new head of international television. Merola replaces the show’s producer Mary Armstrong, who has left the 15-year-old company.

The three-hour, $4.2-million series is a France/Canada coproduction between Pixcom and Transparences Productions, 17 Juin Productions and France 3. The show also garnered excellent ratings for broadcasters in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium and is slated to air in Canada on Radio-Canada and Discovery Channel.

A Species Odyssey recounts the extraordinary story of humankind’s origins, transformation and gradual accumulation of knowledge from the time the first primate stood upright, eight to 12 million years ago, to the day human beings first began to develop agricultural activities, an estimated 10,000 years ago.

The production incorporates 3D images and dramatizations in recreating the lives and stories of our early ancestors, their physical appearance, behavior and environment.

The show’s fabulous makeup and F/X were done by Adrien Morot, Sylvania Yau and crew at Maestro Studios.

And just in, Pixcom claims French President Jacques Chirac himself called Odyssey director Jacques Malaterre to congratulate him on a fabulous job, calling the series ‘exemplaire.’

In other news, the house and exec producers Jacquelin Bouchard and Daniel Beauchesne, in association with CBC and SRC, are developing a TV movie on the life and lifesaving heroics of airline pilot Captain Robert Piche.

In August 2001, Piche safely landed a jumbo jet on an island in the Azores after its engines had completely shut down because of a fuel leak. The highs and lows of Piche’s story are the subject of the Pierre Cayouette best-selling biography Robert Piche: Aux Commandes du Destin, published by Libre Expression.

Original docs on L’oeil ouvert

The Tele-Quebec primetime showcase L’oeil ouvert is one of the most important broadcast windows for long-form (60 to 90 minutes) Quebec documentaries. This season, more than two-thirds of the 27 scheduled docs are original Quebec productions.

Program highlights for winter 2003 include Viva la Frida! (Cine Qua Non Films), a timely portrait of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; L’Humour de Venus (Productions Impex), a survey of 10 female comics and their growing role in the business; A toi pour toujours: un recueil d’histoires d’amour (Productions La Fete), a docudrama collection of love stories of those who survived and did not survive the concentration camps of WWII; and Quebec Inc.: La Petite histoire d’une grande revolution (Cinefilms et Video Productions), a look at modern Quebec society through interviews with leading political and economic personalities, including Quebec Premier Bernard Landry, Jacques Parizeau, Claude Morin and the late Louis Laberge.

Also on the program, Werner Volkmer’s Roussil, ou le curieux anarchiste impentent (Aquilon Film), a portrait of exiled Quebec artist and sculptor Robert Roussil; the knock-out Dan Bigras doc Le Ring interieur (National Film Board), an intimate and extreme journey into the world of marginalized people, violence and martial arts; Raymonde Provencher’s Nes de la haine/L’Amour viole (Macumba International), an examination of rape as an international war crime with profiles of victimized women and children; and Brigitte Nadeau’s La Culture dans tous ses etats: Heritage et perspectives d’avenir (Synercom Teleproductions), a multicultural, celebratory survey of Quebec’s rural and religious heritage.