The AFF premiere of director Nick Willing’s $11-million feature thriller The River King, starring Hollywood thesp Edward Burns and Canucks Rachelle Lefevre (The Legend of Butch & Sundance) and Sean McCann (Miracle), is an appropriate homecoming for two reasons.

First, The River King’s story about the investigation of the murder of a private school student is set and was filmed in Nova Scotia. Second, some key people behind this Canada/U.K. copro between Halifax’s imX communications and The Spice Factory attended the AFF’s Strategic Partners coproduction conference in recent years.

‘Nick Willing was in Halifax on a location scout for The River King during Strategic Partners in 2002,’ says imX director of operations and development Ann Bernier. ‘One of our British coproduction partners, The Spice Factory, also attended Strategic Partners in 2000 and 2003. It is because of our meeting these individuals during the festival that The River King came to fruition.’

The film’s AFF premiere on Sept. 19 will be cause for celebration for The River King coproducer Chris Zimmer of imX, as there were times when he didn’t know if the film was ever going to be completed.

‘We were in preproduction in early 2004, when the British government reversed their rules on some of their tax shelters,’ Zimmer tells Playback. ‘As a result, we lost 30% of our funding when Grosvenor Park’s First Choice Films fund was shut down.’

Three long weeks passed while Zimmer and the film’s other producers scrambled to find new money.

‘We managed to refinance the film, and then had to refinance it a third time during production,’ he says. The second refinancing crashed with two weeks of principal photography remaining, when the U.K.’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport refused to grant the film official status as a U.K. copro, thus stalling eligible Canadian copro funding as well.

Despite this blow, the producers pushed The River King through to completion. Meanwhile, the film ultimately received official copro status from both the U.K. and Canada, the pursuit of which had caused its producers so much grief.

www.imxcommunications.com