Degrassi: The Next Generation has become the first TV program available on a pay-per-download basis in Canada through Puretracks.com.

Filming of The Weight, a new 8 x 60 drama about life in a suburban wasteland from powerhouse writers George F. Walker and Dani Romain, has begun in the Scarborough suburb of Toronto.

The new CBC drama Heartland has started shooting in and around Calgary, turning the best-selling novels by English author Lauren Brooke into a 13 x 60 for the network’s family-aimed Sunday night lineup.

Producer Rob Merilees of Vancouver’s Infinity Features and director Charles Martin Smith wrapped the Canada/U.K. copro Stone of Destiny in Glasgow, Scotland and London on Aug. 10. It is their second feature collaboration, following 2003’s acclaimed The Snow Walker.

Among the many adventures of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey, The Isle of Mists ranks as one of the scariest, according to the author himself.

SK Films has been given US$3 million to go chase butterflies, and plans to shoot its large-screen Flight of the Butterflies through most of next year in Ontario, Texas and Mexico.

HALIFAX — The Growing Op’s lights are on. A production office for the $1.7-million feature has opened in Moncton, NB, and the 22-day shoot begins Aug. 25. Feature first-timer Michael Melski wrote, directs and produces with Monique Leblanc, Doug Pettigrew and Rick Warden. Thom Fitzgerald is the executive producer.

U.S. net The CW has commissioned the first 13 episodes of fish-out-of-the-subcontinent series Aliens in America, a comedy about a Pakistani teen who moves in with a white-bread Wisconsin family. Produced by CBS Paramount Network Television and Warner Bros. Television, the program went to camera in Vancouver on July 30 with a wrap date of Oct. 25.

This year’s bumper crop of Canadian movies at TIFF will send people to their basements in search of old program books to see if there has ever been a comparable lineup in the festival’s 32-year history. But they won’t find one quite like it, because this is the year our film industry comes of age.

‘Edgy’ is the cornucopia of films from ‘virtually every country in the world’ at the 32nd annual Toronto International Film Festival, according to Piers Handling.

Communications master and Serendipity Point Films producer Robert Lantos learned in 1978 that screaming ‘censorship’ from coast-to-coast would grab a lot of free press for a film with no marketing budget.