The women of Winnipeg are very pleased indeed with local producer Kim Todd of Original Pictures, who brought actor Ralph Fiennes to their city for a three-day shoot starting March 20. The hunky Brit was in town to shoot a key sequence for his upcoming feature The Constant Gardner.

In search of a barren, snow-swept landscape, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles visited Winnipeg to scout locations the day after the Oscars, where his film The City of God was nominated for four awards.

It also looks like Winnipeg is going to be home to another major offshore production, the Robin Williams vehicle The Big White, written by Manitoba-born Collin Friesen (The Lone Gunmen), who was at CBC in Winnipeg before leaving for L.A. to become a screenwriter. At this point the production is being described as having a ‘flashing green light.’ It already has an office in town, but as of March 22 was not 100% confirmed.

With Manitoba’s year-end coming at the end of March, the province has already done well over $100 million in production volumes, up over last year, says Carole Vivier, ceo of Manitoba Film & Sound. In fact, over the last four years, despite the challenging production climate across the country, Manitoba has demonstrated steady growth.

According to mfs, between April 2003 and March 2004, 150 full-time positions directly related to the film industry were created in the province and Manitoba producers spent more than 75% of their total production budgets within the province, representing in excess of $130 million over the last five years.

‘I think one of the advantages we have here is unbelievable government support,’ says Vivier. ‘We have not had our programs cut, so our development funding and our equity investment funding has always been there. I think that’s really important because we can invest money as equity in Manitoba productions or coproductions, and that’s a real benefit to the independent sector here.’

Meanwhile, The Constant Gardner and The Big White are indicative of a rise in offshore production in Manitoba. The province introduced its tax-credit program in 1997 and started seeing foreign interest in Manitoba around 1999, when the TV movie Acceptable Risk, from L.A. prodco Zerneck-Sertner Films, shot there. ZSF has since returned to Manitoba for eight additional MOWs.

‘I hope for Winnipeg that it can cultivate a real healthy mix of offshore production and local production,’ says Todd. ‘The money that offshore production brings in, the training it allows, and the building and maintenance of an infrastructure benefit everyone. On the other hand, the local production is what built that infrastructure in the first place. So I think that both sides can be complementary to each other.’

In addition to the short shoot with Fiennes, Original Pictures has three indigenous productions in the works for spring and summer. Todd is producing Falcon Beach, an MOW pilot for a new one-hour drama series for Global coproduced with Toronto’s Insight Entertainment, about goings-on in a small resort town near Lake Winnipeg. The series is targeted at youth in their late teens and early 20s.

‘It’s for what we think is an underserved audience in Canada,’ says Todd. ‘There’s a gap and we’re going for it.’

Todd is also producing A Bear Called Winnie, a CBC MOW about the Canadian story behind the real bear that inspired the A.A. Milne character Winnie the Pooh, who was named after the city of Winnipeg. And in late summer Todd will start shooting The Munro Stories, the third miniseries in a franchise based on short stories by Canadian authors, coproduced with Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films for W Network. The previous two were The Atwood Stories and The Shields Stories.

In terms of guest productions, last summer’s Shall We Dance?, starring Jennifer Lopez, Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, is the biggest-budget feature film to ever have shot in Manitoba. Scheduled to shoot in Toronto last summer, the producers started looking for an alternate location due to the SARS scare. The production provided a significant economic boost for Manitoba, demonstrating that the province could manage a film of that size, and helping to solidify relationships between Miramax and the province.

‘If we had wanted to buy that kind of publicity, we couldn’t have afforded it,’ says Vivier. ‘We met with Miramax after the film, and they were very happy with the way things went. We’ve definitely gotten a lot more scripts from them to scout as a result.’

According to Vivier, however, the success of indigenous films such as Gary Yates’ Seven Times Lucky, developed through the National Screen Institute’s Features First Program, and Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World, both of which screened at Sundance, are also doing a lot to put Manitoba on the map.

More recently, director Noam Gonick, whose previous projects include Hey Happy (2001) and the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), is shooting his latest film, The Stryker, in Manitoba.

‘From the creative side, the independent talent here makes the province much more intriguing to people,’ says Vivier. ‘To us, the mix [of offshore and indigenous production] is really healthy and to maintain a balanced mix is really important.’

-www.mbfilmsound.mb.ca

-www.originalpicturesinc.com