It seems fitting with Canada’s new tolerance for pot smoking that Halifax’s After Dark Productions is currently in development on its first feature, A Bug and a Bag of Weed.

According to After Dark’s Chris Cuthbertson, the film is about three computer store salesmen who inherit a hockey bag full of marijuana from a wild high school friend. Not knowing what else to do with it, they decide to sell the pot using sales tactics learned in their store, and eventually wind up selling it from the store.

Jason Priestley (Beverly Hills 90210), pop/punk queen Bif Naked and Trailer Park Boys’ Robb Wells and John Paul Tremblay are attached to star in the film along with Cuthbertson and his ADP cronies Drew Hagen and Nico Lorenzutti. ADP’s Michael Mason will also produce and David Gonella (Little Boys Blues) will direct.

The film is budgeted at $1 million and, thus far, has secured licence fees from Showcase and the Independent Film Channel Canada and developement funding from Telefilm Canada. At press time, the producers were still waiting to hear back from the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation and Telefilm.

Cuthbertson hopes to begin production in August, but given the uncertainty of the funding situation, he predicts a fall shooting schedule.

‘We’re trying to make something very different from all of the other Canadian films we’ve seen in the past few years,’ says Cuthbertson. ‘We’re an ambitious team.’

ADP recently completed work on a 22-minute mockumentary about a Motley Crue-type cover band called Cruez Control, which has been submitted for consideration to the 23rd Atlantic Film Festival in September.

Arcadia to explore shipwrecks and ‘sluts’

Halifax’s Arcadia Entertainment is going deep to produce a couple of documentary projects, according to owner John Wesley Chisholm.

The first is a feature-length underwater documentary called Buried at Sea, about the search for chemical and biological weaponry that has been lost in the deep over the years.

Chisholm, who will direct and produce on a budget of roughly $475,000, plans to begin production in the fall. It’s his first feature and to date he has development funding from the National Film Board and CBC.

Although a distributor is not yet attached to the project, Chisholm says the doc has sparked interest from distribs and broadcasters.

‘It’s one of those projects that no one says ‘no’ to,’ says Chisholm. ‘It’s a rare project where everyone [wants to] come along, and we have to figure out how’s the best way to go about it.’

Chisholm and Arcadia are also in development on the dive adventure series Dreamwrecks. The HD-shot doc show will visit sink sites where the ships are still fully intact, which Chisholm believes people would rather watch than a ‘pile of stone at the bottom of the sea.’ Although no broadcaster is attached yet, Chisholm says Arcadia has been pursuing History Television.

Moving away from underwater production, Arcadia is developing a second $475,000 feature doc called Fast Girls, based on the book by Emily White. Chisholm describes the doc as an exploration of ‘the teenaged tribe and the myth of the high school slut.’

He says broadcasters are also having a tough time saying no to this one. With the Independent Film Channel Canada and Life Network already on board, Chisholm reports additional interest from CTV, Channel 4, HBO and Oxygen. He will produce with Arcadia’s Colin MacKenzie (Jerry Granelli: In the Moment). Andrea Dorfman (Parsley Days) will direct.

Before getting to its new projects, however, Arcadia is still in production on two one-hour docs: Mabel Bell’s Aerial Experiment for History and CBC, and 21st Century Freemasons for VisionTV and IFC.

Salter’s Poko to bring emotion & laughter to kids

Details are beginning to emerge about the best-kept secret at Halifax’s Salter Street Films – the preschool stop-motion series Poko.

Series creator and co-executive producer Jeff Rosen describes Poko as ‘the Marx Brothers meet Wallace & Gromit’ for tots. And three years after hatching the idea, Rosen and the Poko crew are beginning to see a light at the end of the clay tunnel – CBC is set to air Poko as the flagship program in its Get Set for Life block beginning in January 2004. Production on 30-plus half-hour eps began in early 2003 and continues through the year.

Poko is a three-year-old boy who only interacts in the show with his dog, Minus, and his stuffed monkey, Mr. Murphy, in two settings – Poko’s bedroom or backyard. Rosen says the stories are about very simple things that seem quite harrowing to a small child (keeping the dog out of the wading pool or reaching the doorknob). For further dynamics between Poko and Minus, the former can draw pictures that come to life while the latter has the uncanny ability to erase things with his nose.

‘When we started to design the show, we realized there was a great gap in preschool programming – which is emotional development, specifically, helping children identify emotions and model coping skills to manage feelings like frustration, fear, anger and sadness,’ says Rosen. ‘For very young children, a day is an emotional minefield.’

According to Rosen, a ‘world-class’ stop-motion team has been assembled for Poko, including key personnel from Aardman Animation’s Wallace & Gromit. Big Comfy Couch co-creator Cheryl Wagner is the series’ creative producer and was integral in the development of the show, says Rosen, who is executive producing with Salter’s Michael Donovan.

Although he won’t divulge the series’ budget, Rosen says it is very healthy in terms of what is normally allotted for preschool programming. Funders include the LFP and EIP and the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation.

imX copro to shoot in India

Shooting on the romantic feature The Partition, a coproduction between Halifax’s imX communications and L.A./U.K. prodco Myriad Pictures, is scheduled to begin late this year in India. Vic Sarin (Cold Comfort) will direct from a script he cowrote with Patricia Finn. imX’s Chris Zimmer will produce with Steve Clark-Hall of Skyline Films, London, and Tina Pehme of Sepia Films, Vancouver/L.A. Jimi Mistry (The Guru) has been cast in the lead role.

Set in post-WWII India, the story is about a thirtysomething British Indian Army vet (Mistry) who falls for a 17-year-old girl whose life has been torn apart by a series of events that has left her separated from her family. The film will also touch on the divide between the Hindu and Muslim religious factions in Pakistan and India.