The Atlantic provinces’ unique landscape and strong tax credits continue to successfully lure some guest shoots, but domestic productions continue to be the local industry’s main driver.

Overall, the current prognosis for business is healthy.

‘We’re cycling into a good period of production,’ says St. John’s, NF-based Jennice Ripley of Kickham East Productions, as she preps the CBC half-hour comedy pilot Rabbittown for a September shoot.

The fortunes of Atlantic Canada have long ebbed and flowed according to forces beyond its shores. The recent rise of the Canadian dollar along with rival provinces raising their tax credits did not bode well for the number of foreign producers coming east.

But now the tide is turning, as a spate of East Coast-set projects have been greenlit and are coming for the region’s rugged coastlines and placid ‘New England’ look. Also, there have been some enhancements on the tax-credit front to counter the hikes in other provinces.

‘We’re recovering. Most of the crews seem to be pretty busy and no one is too cranked about being out of work,’ says Chris Zimmer, president of Halifax prodco imX communications.

Film shoots including the Billy Bob Thornton thriller Fade Out and local productions Trailer Park Boys: The Movie and the Roméo Dallaire feature drama in prep for The Halifax Film Company and Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions lead the current production surge.

PowerPost Production, the region’s biggest post provider, has been seeing a number of projects under its Halifax roof, including the After Dark Productions feature A Bug and a Bag of Weed, the TPB movie, the German copro MOW The Conclave, and the New Brunswick-shot miniseries Canada Russia 1972, which recreates hockey’s hallowed Summit Series.

On the TV front, Rob Lowe and Julia Ormond are in Halifax costarring in the Lifetime mini Beach Girls, and Tom Selleck is returning to Nova Scotia next month to star in the next two installments of the CBS MOW franchise Stone Cold, a police drama set in a coastal New England town.

The CBC, looking to local producers to help meet its goal of doubling its primetime load of scripted programs, has also contributed to local business (as in the case of Rabbittown).

Also helpful is Strategic Partners, the Atlantic Film Festival’s annual international coproduction and coventuring market that brings together local and international producers (see story, p. 18).

Jan Miller, Strategic Partners director, cites the example of Michael Cowan of U.K.-based Spice Factory having partnered with imX to coproduce the Edward Burns feature The River King after attending Strategic Partners. The film shot last spring in Halifax and awaits release.

And unlike other Canadian provinces that take fright when Hollywood bypasses Toronto and Vancouver for Prague or Sydney, Atlantic Canada maintains a locals-first policy.

‘We realized that being in the middle of the ocean, Hollywood wasn’t coming here too often. So our activity has been predominantly to help indigenous production,’ says Chris Bonnell, director of programs at the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation.

Ann MacKenzie, CEO of the Nova Scotia Development Corporation, similarly favors investing more in local producers than hiking tax credits to impress footloose Hollywood producers.

‘Local producers help us get the service work we have. [Foreign producers] wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have the local industry going all year,’ she says.

Tax credits in Atlantic Canada have traditionally been high, and most have remained at the status quo, with Nova Scotia providing the exception.

Newfoundland and New Brunswick maintain a 40% tax credit, based on local labor expenditures, while this past March, Nova Scotia increased its tax credit to 35% from 30% for Halifax shoots – both foreign and local – and to 40% from 35% for those elsewhere in the province. The province also introduced a 5% bonus for prodcos that shoot two projects in the province in a two-year span, similar to an incentive in Manitoba.

Prince Edward Island provides a refund to producers of 30% of the eligible P.E.I. and deemed labor costs or 15% of eligible total production costs, whichever is less.

MacKenzie says she favors Nova Scotia filmmakers producing with U.K. or German partners, for example, so they can maintain creative and financial control of their projects. Meanwhile, Bonnell’s Holy Grail is seeing Newfoundlanders coproduce with other Canadians to share production costs and exploit available tax credits. And some are doing just that.

St. John’s Pope Productions and Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films are coproducing the CBC WWII-era mini Above and Beyond, as well as the comedy series Life with Derek for Family Channel.

Senior producer Paul Pope says his collaboration with Shaftesbury emerged after a long search for an Ontario partner, not least of all to help assemble the cast and crew for his local productions.

‘When I made [the feature comedy] Rare Birds, it became obvious that we’re always going to use a certain amount of crew and services out of Ontario,’ he says. ‘So I started to do my shopping in Toronto and found Shaftesbury to have serious filmmaking people.’

Pope is also collaborating with Toronto’s Triptych Media on the MOW Heyday!, which stars Gordon Pinsent, as well as producing the one-hour doc Ferry Command for CBC, and 13 half-hours of the doc series Legends & Lore of the North Atlantic for Global.

In the end, Atlantic Canada producers insist they work harder and innovate to make up for geography situating them further afoot from Hollywood than most other Canuck production hubs.

‘Because we have a strong sense of place, we maximize that,’ says Kickham’s Ripley. ‘But we still keep an eye on what’s going on in the American marketplace.’