Montreal: Following his arrival here in 1953, Il Duce Canadese producer Claudio Luca of Cine Tele-Action met many of the Italian-Canadians who were interned during WWII. The producer says he’s been working on a TV dramatization of their story for the past decade. The four-hour miniseries wrapped 34 days of filming earlier this month under director Giles Walker (Princes in Exile, Galidor).

The story keys on the events of June 1940 when the Canadian government launched a series of quickly improvised raids to detain ‘enemy’ aliens. Over 5,000 Italians across Canada were rounded up and some 800 were detained in isolation camps (at Camp Petawawa, ON, recreated at St. Gabriel de Brandon, near Joliette, QC) for several years. Luca says many lost their jobs and possessions, and many spoke neither French nor English.

Broadcasters on the $5.2-million production are CBC, Radio-Canada and Showcase Television. Luca (The Last Chapter, Big Bear) says CBC and Brian Freeman, newly named creative head of special projects, drama, offered tremendous encouragement.

Cast includes Gianpaolo Venuta, Tony Nardi, Marina Orsini, Dino Tavarone, Joe Pingui, Ron Lea, Louise Lapare and Michael Miranda. The production uses 700 extras.

Il Duce Candese was written by Bruno Ramirez. DOP Sylvain Brault shot on Super 16mm and Mario Hervieux is the art director. Nicky Luca is PM, Emanuelle Pre-Daigle is supervising producer and Denis Papillon is picture editor. Lab services are by Vision Globale.

Tele-Action hopes to produce a second season of the YTV sitcom Fries With That? and is in development on the six-hour English/French miniseries Rene Levesque from screenwriter Genevieve Lefebvre and director Pierre Houle.

Spielberg returns

After Catch Me If You Can filmed briefly in Montreal and Quebec City just over a year ago, American director/producer Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks SKG/Amblin are returning to Montreal for two weeks of filming (Dec. 1-13) on The Terminal, a story about an immigrant fleeing a war-torn nation who finds himself without a country and is forced to live in an airport. The film stars Tom Hanks (The Green Mile), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Intolerable Cruelty), Chi McBride and Stanley Tucci.

Virtually all the filming will take place at the sprawling, low-volume, charter-only Mirabel International Airport, about 45 minutes north of the city. Mirabel provides the filmmakers with several prerequisites such as customs and immigration facilities, a tarmac and access to an underground network of working baggage carousels.

Dany Brassard, film commissioner for the Argenteuil-Laurentians Film and TV Commission, says the producers had earlier received some 350 CD-ROM photos of Mirabel.

Production services on The Terminal are being provided by Muse Entertainment Enterprises and the shoot’s supervising producer Irene Litinsky, Muse’s president of production.

Producers are Walter Parkes and Laurie Macdonald. Janusz Kaminski is the DOP and Alex McDowell is the designer. Montrealers on the STCVQ/DGC-Quebec shoot include PM Ric Nash and art director Isabelle Guay.

Terminal preps from Oct. 13 to Nov. 19.

It has been another busy year for Muse, service-wise, having worked on the Wayne Beach thriller Slow Burn, produced by Greenlight Films (In the Bedroom) and starring Ray Liotta and LL Cool J, as well as on the TNT Network movie Bad Apple, the story of an FBI agent posing as a mob runner, directed by Adam Bernstein and starring Christopher North and Mercedes Ruehl (Guilt By Association).

Busy slate at Copie Zero

Copie Zero Television and Media recently inked a deal with ZeD, CBC’s late-night short film showcase, for 20 episodes of its animated film review series And Yet I Blame Hollywood. The shorts are being produced out of the company’s Charlottetown, PEI office and are scripted by Dave Stewart, who does the strip cartoon review in the Charlottetown alternative paper The Buzz. Campbell Webster is producing and the animation is by Fat Kat Animation of Miramichi City, NB.

Matt Zimbel, Copie Zero’s president and exec producer, says the house just wrapped taping on the one-hour W Network doc Secret Language of Girls, exec produced by Zimbel and Webster, and produced by Katherine Ouimet. The project was a finalist at the 2001 BTVF Documart and was written by Josey Vogels, who writes a sex and relationships column for a slew of alternative newspapers and a weekly column in four dailies. Tara Johns directed the 21-day road trip in cities and towns all over Ontario and Quebec, and in U.S. locations such as Washington, DC and New York City.

The doc examines the unique method of communication women have with each other and is based on Vogels’ book of the same name.

The program is budgeted at $247,000, with funding from the CTF Licence Fee Program, Rogers Cable Network Fund and SODEC, and will air in spring of ’04. Production exec for W is Barbara Shearer.

Launched in ’99, Copie Zero is in development with CBC on a one-hour ‘performance documentary’ called Anne with an E, a look at the hugely successful stage musical Anne of Green Gables, which celebrates its 40th anniversary next summer. The project was a finalist in the Banff Television Festival HD pitch competition.

Shelagh O’Brien is slated to direct next summer on a budget of $2.5 million. Writers include Webster, Zimbel, O’Brien and Duncan MacIntosh. Development support has come from Technology PEI and Telefilm Canada.

The house scored two Gemini nominations this year for the CTV Amanda Marshall special Everybody’s got a Story. Sony Music released a DVD based on the show.

Copie Zero is also in development on a ‘white elephant series’ about ‘mega-government projects gone bad’ called 7 Blunders of the World, as well as bio doc on the late great singer/songwriter Gene MacClellan, who composed for Elvis, Bing Crosby, songbird Anne Murray and others. ‘The family has given us access to everything, including Gene’s personal diaries,’ says Zimbel, who performed with MacClellan in the late 1970s. Halifax-based Donna Davies will direct and Zimbel is currently looking for a broadcaster.

Neron stars in Eternal

Following 13 days of shooting in Rome, Umbria and Venice, production is now complete on the 25-day local portion of Eternal, the ambitious feature film debut from the city’s newest ‘digital boutique studio,’ WildKoast Entertainment. The filmmakers, longtime friends Wilhelm Liebenberg and Federico Sanchez, wrote, produced, designed and directed the movie, which Liebenberg says is part of a trilogy.

Eternal will be distributed in Canada by TVA Films (The Pianist, Le Pacte des Loups), probably in the spring of ’04.

The film is inspired by the real-life 16th century Romanian ‘Blood Countess’ Erzsebet Bathory, apparently one of the most prolific female serial killers of all time.

Set in modern-day Montreal and Venice, the film is a ‘sensual psychological thriller,’ starring Conrad Pla (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Sum of All Fears) as a hardboiled detective obsessed with a beautiful and enigmatic aristocrat, played by Caroline Neron (Tribu.com, Diva), and her companion, played by Victoria Sanchez (Student Bodies, P.T. Barnum).

Selected craft credits go to line producer/PM Alain Gagnon, DOP Jamie Thompson, who shot in high-definition, and art director Perri Gorrara.

South Africa-born Liebenberg’s background is in design and advertising. Sanchez, who hails from the Spanish Canary Island, has worked as a comic book writer and was a producer on Slayers, a digital action movie, and the live-action, sci-fi Internet serial Ghetto-Tech. Bruce Robertson is Eternal’s exec producer.

Liebenberg says the film has a big-time budget of over $10 million and was completely financed with private funds raised entirely in Quebec.

The producers are in negotiations for an international sales agent.

WildKoast’s next project is a spy thriller called Forbidden Landscape. It’s slated to shoot next summer in Montreal, Istanbul, Moscow and St. Petersberg.

More foreign film action

Principal photography on the CBS biopic The Reagans wrapped earlier this month at the 7,500 square-foot Cine-Cite Montreal studios. The film chronicles the relationship of actor/former U.S. president Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy, from the early years in Hollywood to their time in the White House. James Brolin and Judy Davis star.

Three months of local shooting wrapped Oct. 16 on the Columbia Pictures thriller Secret Window. The film was directed by prolific screenwriter David Koepp and stars Johnny Depp, who was spotted around town in the company of his lovely French wife, Vanessa Paradis.

Also filming here through to Nov. 8 is the United Artists feature The Woods from producers Sean and Bryan Furst and E. Rosenblatt. The director is Lucky McKee and cast includes Agnes Bruckner and Patricia Clarkson. Local craft credits go to PM Ronald Gilbert and art director Ray Dupuis.

Newly set up at Mel’s Cite du Cinema is the Red Roses (Canada) feature Noel from actor/director/writer Chazz Palminteri (Just Like Mona, The Usual Suspects), with a top-line cast that includes Robin Williams, Penelope Cruz and Susan Sarandon. The story unfolds over two days at Christmas and is partly set in a hospital.

Al Corley and Bart Rosenblatt are producing. Carol Spier is the designer, Russell Carpenter is the DOP and Micheline Garant is the PM. The film is crewed by the STCVQ and shoots from Nov. 6 to Dec. 23.