Telefilm Canada has announced its selections for the first of two rounds in the Screenwriting Assistance Program, which will give advances to 33 screenwriters for their outlines and treatments.

A total of 22 English- and 11 French-language script treatments and first drafts will receive advances totaling around $460,000. Each applicant in the ‘outline to treatment’ stage receives just under $12,000, while applicants going from treatments to first drafts get more than $16,500 each.

In the treatment-to-first-draft stage, some of the English-language recipients are Toronto-based filmmaker Ryan Redford for his script Bone, John Hazlett’s Lucky Little Harbour, Lee Hoverd’s Nerds Versus Vampires, and Rickie Mehta and Shaun Mehta’s The Rickshaw Man. French-language recipients include Denis Langlois and Bertrand Lachance for L’Incroyable destin de Mathieu-le-Tambour, Serge Dubé’s Mouton Blanc, Marc Bisaillon’s Faits Divers, and André Forcier and Linda Pinet’s Némésis.

Among the screenwriters whose outlines to treatments were selected are Jacques E. Bouchard, Willem Wennekers, Martin Doyon, Sarah Goodman and Brad Hart.

Toronto-based filmmaker Gaurav Seth, who made the Indian culture-themed films A Passage to Ottawa and Pink Ludoos, was elated to see his name as a recipient of a ‘treatment to first draft’ grant, but can’t hide his frustration that the semi-annual program does not keep the same pace screenwriters do.

‘It’s a great program, I just think it needs to be expanded,’ says Seth, co-writer with Will Pascoe of the winning Karma Chameleon, a comedy/drama about a doctor from India trying to fit in with the locals in a Newfoundland town. ‘With a deadline only every six months, you finish [a treatment] and the process has to stop until the next deadline. There’s a huge gap and the momentum is gone.’

The Screenwriters Assistance Program was launched in 2000 as part of Telefilm’s Feature Film Fund. A jury of screenwriters, film producers, directors and distribution executives choose the recipients.

The next submission deadline for the program is Oct. 11.

www.telefilm.gc.ca