Ottawa: Film and TV productions are flowing through national capital prodcos faster than the beat in an Ed Broadbent rap video and, much like the savvy politico’s campaign tactics, the productions assume atypical forms.

Ottawa’s Les Productions Charbonneau rolls soon on a $3-million Ontario/Manitoba coproduction, Destination NOR’OUEST, with Winnipeg’s Les Productions Rivard. TVA and TFO licensed the eight-hour historical series, apparently a TVA first. Charbonneau producer Marie-Pierre Gariepy says the series will recreate the marathon canoe trips taken by the fur-trading voyageurs in the 1700s and 1800s. Robert Charbonneau and Louis Paquin exec produce.

Gariepy is also coproducing – along with the National Film Board’s Ontario/Ouest studio – a one-hour, $300,000 POV doc on kids leaving the foster care system and the challenges they face. Moving Out/Les Jeunes de la Couronne wraps production this month. Gariepy says director Andree Cazabon (No Quick Fix) is following the lives of both a French and an English child as they leave the care of the state. Claudette Jaiko is NFB producer. The doc arrives at CBC and Radio-Canada in February.

Sound Venture Productions, which recently coproduced the CBC Paul Gross political thriller mini H20 (formerly The Last Prime Minister), remains busy. President Neil Bregman says his crew is prepping the fifth and planning the sixth in a series of murder mystery TV movies, all Ontario/Quebec copros with Reel One Entertainment of Montreal but heading for Ottawa shoots.

Prepro is underway on the $1.4-million The Perfect Neighbour, directed by Doug Jackson, who helmed the previous The Perfect Husband, and set to air on The Movie Network and Lifetime in the U.S., like its predecessors. Imagination Worldwide is distributing The Perfect Neigbour.

Interprovincial financing isn’t new to Bregman, but ‘the whole movie thing is new. I’ve been working with producers across the country, and I’ve been on the board of the CFTPA. One thing led to another and then I was doing movies for, and now with, Tom Berry [of Reel One]. They took a chance and brought a movie to the market and now we’re doing more.’

Bregman’s ‘coolest project and a very prestigious undertaking’ is the production of about 160 audio and video components for exhibits, video and cinema programming for Canada’s under-construction war museum. Sound Venture is also developing a doc on architect Raymond Moriyama. ‘Moriyama’s family was interned in Canada during the Second World War,’ adding to the story’s intrigue, Bregman reflects.

At Chelsea, QC-based Nunacom, shooting wraps end of August on an ‘almost cinema verite’ documentary that follows the making of a ‘travel/recipe book as written and photographed by masters of the genre… Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.’ The Recipe Diaries is directed and written by Nunacom principal Jacques Menard and produced for Nunacom by Hoda Elatawi. The $235,000 one-hour will air on Food Network’s Sunday Showcase next year, with a second window on Life. Menard says he and DOP Louis Durocher (Les Aventures tumultueuses de Jack Carter) tracked Alford and Duguid as they immersed themselves in Indian subcontinent food and culture, with location shoots in Sri Lanka, India, Ontario and New York City.

Elatawi is also a senior producer at Ottawa’s GAPC, where she’s producing Canada’s Butterfly, a one-hour doc for Bravo! on Ottawa opera singer Maria Pellegrini. The title derives from Pellegrini’s signature performance in Madama Butterfly.

‘We really wanted to [make this film] because here was this opera star living right in our backyard,’ says Elatawi. ‘We retrace her life and take a look at where she’s going. She still has a beautiful voice.’ GAPC hopes Bravo! will air the film, directed by Ron Allen and exec produced by Ken Stewart, this fall. SCN has second window.

Back in indie mode, Elatawi is also producing Keys to the Coffin, an Ontario Media Development Corporation Calling Card short by writer Keith Davidson, who will direct. Shooting this month, the film’s concept reveals what happens when a young woman writer leaves her entry for a short story contest in view on her computer. Her husband and then her superintendent decide to spin the tale from vastly different points of view. Investors are the OMDC, GAPC, Algonquin College (where the film will shoot) and the crew members, who ‘are working for almost nothing,’ says Elatawi gratefully, adding she hopes the team can do a feature next.

Over at Gatineau’s Productions Roch Brunette, work is underway on a French-track magazine series about Canada’s favorite game, called simply, Hockey! Production manager Carole Thibeault welcomes a comparison to the all-time classic Howie Meeker’s Hockey School. But Brunette’s 26 half-hours, hosted by ‘a guy and a girl’ and including off-ice segments with the on-ice drills, sound more imaginative than the Howie show (‘Kids! Never, never pass in front of your own net!’).

The $600,000 series shoots all summer, using 150 players from a Gatineau league to demo skill development. Hockey! checks into APTN Oct. 4 and likely hits TFO by Christmas.

Finally, what do you get when you cross a can-do actor/comedian with a carpenter sidekick? You get Me, My House & I, with Brigitte Gall, a home reno show for W, shot in Ottawa’s trendy New Edinburgh. Production manager Sarah Deline of Mountain Road Productions says the 13 half-hours, which wrapped last month, ‘are hilarious. Brigitte is so game to try things – she needed to replace the roof and she did a small section herself before calling in the pros.’ Mountain Road’s Tim Alp produces and directs for a September launch.

-www.soundventure.com

-www.gapc.com

-www.prb.ca (Productions Roch Brunette)

-www.mountainroad.ca