Filmmakers including Thom Fitzgerald, Bruce McDonald and Michael Mabbott are getting a helping hand from The Harold Greenberg Fund, which on Tuesday announced the last round of funding for its fiscal year, backing 27 new and ongoing projects.

Mabbott’s Chump Change, based on David Eddie’s comic novel, and Fitzgerald’s drama Consecrated Ground, based on the Governor General Award-nominated play by George Elroy Boyd, received funding in the story optioning phase of the script development program, along with three other projects.

Fitzgerald (3 Needles) tells Playback Daily the money helped subsidize him to get the rights to Boyd’s play.

‘It’s very useful because at such early stages. It was important to be able to pay a fair price to the playwright,’ says Fitzgerald, who has completed a preliminary draft of the script. Consecrated Ground centers on an African-Canadian couple in the final months of Africville, a community in Halifax that was bulldozed by the city in the 1960s.

‘It’s a very powerful story of which the effects are still tangible in Nova Scotia,’ he says.

Other recipients who received funding in the script development program include screenwriters Bruce McDonald (The Tracey Fragments) for Hard Core Logo II, his follow-up to the 1996 rockumentary Hard Core Logo, and Willem Wennekers (Weirdsville) for Maid in the Mist. Both projects are in the second draft phase.

‘It is particularly exciting to see some of our projects progress through every stage of our script development program,’ commented John Galway, fund president for the English-language program in a release.

Meanwhile, director Charles Martin Smith scored in the equity investment program for his drama Stone of Destiny, a follow-up to 2002’s The Snow Walker.