Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, who has helmed features Hulk, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm, will be in Canada this summer to add a gay-themed western to his eclectic repertoire. And what better place to mix gay culture with cowboys than Alberta?

Brokeback Mountain, adapted from an E. Annie Proulx short story by Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), who also executive produces, is tentatively set to start shooting in June. The unconventional love story set in the 1960s stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.

‘There are a lot of people here who admire [Ang Lee’s] work and are holding out for any position to work on his movie,’ says Calgary film commissioner Beth Thompson. ‘We tend to do a lot of television in Alberta, so it will be great to have a feature film here.’

The Brokeback production, from L.A.’s Focus Features, is looking to partner with an Alberta company, making it eligible for provincial funding of up to $750,000 under the Alberta Film Development Program.

The program, created in 1999, was designed to grow the local production community by providing incentives for foreign producers shooting in Alberta to partner with local production companies. Films that otherwise might be strictly service productions become coproductions under the AFDP.

For example, three MOWs based on the tv series The Little House on the Prairie are being shot in Alberta with Calgary-based Voice Pictures producer Wendy Hill-Tout. The Touchstone/Disney properties, with a cumulative budget of $20 million, started shooting in and around Calgary March 10 and will go back-to-back, wrapping June 18.

Hill-Tout, whose company exclusively works on coproductions, says the AFDP helped her develop relationships internationally.

‘Everything is about international financing,’ she says. ‘If you don’t have anything to bring to the table on the financing level, then you’re not going to have much work. [Without the AFDP], Alberta wouldn’t be involved in Blue Eden.’

Blue Eden is a US$26-million family feature coproduced by Voice, Montreal’s Muse Entertainment, Spice Factory in the U.K. and Trilogy Entertainment, an L.A.-based company run by U.K.-born Pen Densham and Canadian John Watson.

Written and directed by Densham (Moll Flanders), the feature tells the story of a young boy who is kidnapped by pirates and ends up on a deserted island after being rescued by dolphins. Shooting on an island off Honduras, the production will finish 50 days of principal photography Aug. 31.

‘It’s a very commercial film,’ says Hill-Tout. ‘I think it’s really exciting for Canada because we need to get more English Canadian films on the screen with good distribution.’

According to Hill-Tout, Alberta is starting to see an increase in production volumes and is gearing up for a busy summer, something she hopes will bring some Alberta filmmakers home.

‘The sad thing for Alberta is that many of our best people left over the years because there wasn’t enough volume of production,’ she says.

Hill-Tout, who has done coproductions with partners from the U.K. and Germany, also says she is seeing an increase in partnerships with U.S. producers.

‘Americans are now being forced to look for financing elsewhere, which they did not do in the past,’ she says. ‘They are in the same situation as everyone else – their licences have been cut back, money is scarcer and the market, internationally, is tighter.’

Alberta film commissioner Dan Chugg notes that almost all the 17 features, MOWs and pilots that shot in the province last year partnered with a local producer.

‘We’ve started to really grow a strong indigenous production community that can not only do indigenous work, but is also capable of partnering with the big players,’ says Chugg. ‘We’re seeing that people such as Disney, who would never have considered us before, are now prepared to partner with Alberta producers.’

He says production in Alberta is up overall, and volumes for this year look like they will be higher than last.

‘We have nine greenlit projects as of March 12, which is almost staggering to us,’ says Chugg.

‘In a province with a resource-based economy, where you have depleting natural resources, the advantage here is that [film] is an infinitely renewable resource,’ he adds. ‘You can shoot the same mountain every day and export it without doing any harm.’

-www.albertafilm.ca

-www.voicepictures.com