Bruce McDonald has shot and wrapped his latest feature, ending a 14-day stay around Hamilton and Brantford, ON for the long-awaited The Tracey Fragments.

The picture – on McDonald’s ‘to do’ list for several years – has the increasingly bankable Ellen Page (X-Men: The Last Stand, Hard Candy) in the lead as a traumatized teen girl who spends most of the story riding on the back of a city bus, naked but for a torn shower curtain, looking for her missing brother. Some interior scenes shot at Wallace Studios.

Page, 19, has been in the running to star in Fragments since its earliest development around 2000.

‘The entire film rests on her shoulders,’ says producer Sarah Timmins. ‘The film is a memory piece, and basically all told and seen from the perspective of Tracey… We’re so happy she’s with us.’

The script by Maureen Medved comes from her 1998 novel of the same name, and marks the feature producing debut of Timmins, formerly of Epitome Pictures, who crossed paths with McDonald during his work there on Degrassi: The Next Generation.

‘It’s Degrassi meets Hendrix,’ says McDonald, similar in some ways to his work on the popular teen soap but ‘more psychological, less of a social issue thing.’

Fragments is shooting on a shoestring, with a half-million-dollar budget supported by Telefilm Canada, The Movie Network/Movie Central, The Harold Greenberg Fund and Rogers Telefund, much of which will go into what is expected to be a lengthy spell of post-production.

McDonald is going for a ‘pop-art explosion’ look with this one – citing inspirations such as Peter Greenaway and Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair – and will team with editor Jeremy Munce (Picture Claire) on its multi-frame editing. McDonald and DOP Steve Cosens (Whiskey Echo, Snow Cake) shot on digital.

‘He really knows his shit,’ he says of Cosens, ‘but he also always goes a few steps further.’

Fragments is a copro of Timmins’ Corvid Pictures and McDonald’s Shadow Shows in association with Alcina Pictures (Sonny by Dawn). Timmins produces under execs Paul Barkin and Phyllis Laing.

Fragments does not have a distributor, but is expected to go on the festival circuit this fall or in early 2007.

McDonald’s last feature, The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess, lost its distributor when Montreal-based Cinema Libre went out of business in 2005. The rights went back to McDonald, who now doubts the picture will ever see theaters.

McDonald is continuing to develop Maximum Rock n Roll, another feature in the vein of his early hits Highway 61 and Hard Core Logo, with producer Marco Pecota.