Astral Media’s Harold Greenberg Fund is helping bankroll the latest movies by Canadian directors Jonathan Sobol and Anita Doron, via its equity investment program.

The most recent investment by the English language industry fund includes writer/director Jonathan Sobol’s Black Marks, a comedy about brotherhood, honour and revenge.

Sobol’s debut feature, the Niagara Falls-set comedy A Beginner’s Guide to Endings, bowed at TIFF in 2010 with a stellar cast that included Harvey Keitel, Scott Caan and Tricia Helfer. He also wrote the 2006 comedy Citizen Duane.

Sobol’s latest project portrays a third-rate motorcycle daredevil and semi-reformed art thief who teams up with his brother to steal one of the rarest books in the world.

Nicholas Tabarrok of Darius Films (Defendor) is producing Black Marks.

John Galway, the fund’s English-Language program president, said Sobol’s film so far securing a range of foreign distribution advances and pre-sales to goose its production budget, encouraged the equity investment program to back Black Marks.

“This film fits nicely in Jonathan’s growth, and is a natural progression to a bigger budget zone,” Galway tells Playback Daily.

The Harold Greenberg Fund is also backing writer/director Anita Doron’s Lesser Blessed, which will star Benjamin Bratt and is based on the novel by Richard Van Camp.

Doron’s last movie was the 2010 atmospheric feature Europa, East.

Lesser Blessed tells the story of a native teenager struggling to cope with a painful past and to find his place in a confusing and stressful modern world.

Christina Piovesan and Alex Lalonde of Gen One Films are producing Anita Doron’s film.

“Part of the attraction was the combination of Anita, whose career is well-established but is moving to another level, with the guidance of Christina Piovesan and Alex Lalonde, who were behind The Whistleblower,” Galway explains.