Vancouver: Director Anne Wheeler is at the helm of The Competition, a holiday comedy currently shooting in B.C. for Lifetime Television.

Coproduced by Vancouver’s Legacy Filmworks and L.A.-based Nasser Productions, the MOW is about a community gone wild in a yuletide house-decorating competition after a local store owner orders 6,000 cases of Christmas lights instead of 60. Legacy’s Deboragh Gabler (The Accidental Witness) is producing, with Jack Nasser (The Suspect) as executive producer. Richard Leder (Amber’s Story) penned the script.

Wheeler, who recently returned from South Africa where she was shooting episodes of the new CBC drama Jozi-H, says she had planned to use the summer to work on her own material, but the opportunity to work with Gabler on the bittersweet script – which deals with both community silliness and the serious issue of a man’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease – won her over.

The cast includes Kristen Dalton (The Dead Zone), Gary Chalk (Stargate SG-1), Robert Moloney (Godiva’s) and Tom Heaton (Slither). Wheeler says while she and the cast are working primarily from Leder’s script, ‘there is a lot of room for improv and to exploit the comedy within the actors.’

The Competition is scheduled to wrap Sept. 9.