It’s getting so that an honest, occasionally hard-working reporter can’t keep up with the goings-on at the National Film Board – which, in the past few weeks, has launched a new awards show, partnered with APTN on native films, and turned out huge buzz at Hot Docs with its closing-night feature The Last Round. And now, as if reading those three (three!) press releases wasn’t enough work, comes word that our dear old board is in production on five new docs in Ontario. Oy.

The NFB has partnered with Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions and director Avi Lewis on Fire the Experts, a look at global politics set against elections in Argentina, shooting through June. Silva Basmajian produces for the board, along with Lewis, Laszlo Barna and Syd Suissa.

Board producer Peter Starr is attached to the just-wrapped Invisible Children, director Craig Chiver’s doc about kids in poverty, and is also copro-ing the biodoc Hardwood with Ontario Media Development Corporation Al Waxman Calling Card director Hubert Davis.

The NFB also backed director Aeyliya Husain (Relationships) on her one-hour The World at 10, in which she followed three 10-year-old kids through a school year at Lord Dufferin public school in Toronto. Naomi Wise (elove) is DOP, Roland Schlimme (Gambling, Gods and LSD) is editor and Basmajian produces.

‘It looks at their challenges, struggles and how they fit in,’ says Husain, but adds it’s not all ‘doom and gloom.’ CBC’s Rough Cuts will air the doc sometime in ’03/04, followed by a second run on Vision TV.

On a similar note, Lynne Glazier is shooting Speaking Girl to Girl for the board and producer Gerry Flahive until June, digging into the ‘complex world of girl bullying’ from the bully’s point of view.

Sienna thinks Pink

That Touch of Pink is partway through its five-week stay in Toronto and, come June, will pull up stumps for a final week of shooting in London. The Canada/U.K. copro – by Toronto’s Sienna Films and Martin Pope Productions – is the feature debut of writer/director and Canuck expat Ian Iqbal Rashid and stars Jimi Mistry (The Guru, EastEnders) as a young man sharing a flat with the ghost of Cary Grant, played by the always dashing Kyle MacLachlan (Sex and the City). Suleka Mathew (The Republic of Love), Brian George (Bubble Boy) and Kristen Holden-Ried (K-19: The Widowmaker) also star. Sienna principals Julia Sereny and Jennifer Kawaja produce along with Pope and associate producer Brent Barclay. David Makin is DOP and Susan Maggi will edit.

After five years in development, the drama drew funds from Telefilm Canada, The Harold Greenberg Fund, Astral Media, Mongrel Media, Alliance Atlantis, Helkon SK, The Movie Network, Movie Central and Citytv. Mongrel will distribute in Canada, Helkon in the U.K. and AAC will handle the international scene. City has first broadcast rights, followed by TMN and Movie Central.

Sienna (Marion Bridge) is also waiting on Telefilm cash to proceed with I, Claudia, having secured a CBC licence fee and, against all odds, a $168,000 offer from CTF’s Licence Fee Program. It’s a feature-length adaptation of the one-woman play by Dora-winner Kristen Thomson, who will again star and is currently adapting the script with director Chris Abraham. Claudia should go to camera this winter.

Just the Facts

Two doc series are also on the go at DECODE Entertainment, which earlier this year announced a move into factual with the 13 x 60 series Be The Creature by Chris and Martin Kratt, directors of the Emmy-winning kids show Zoboomafoo. DECODE is producing and has worldwide distribution rights for the wildlife series, shooting on an undisclosed budget in far-flung locales like Botswana, Savuti and Alaska until next year.

DECODE’s Steven DeNure and Beth Stevenson produce along with the Brothers Kratt. Watch for it on CBC up here and on National Geographic Channel in the U.S.

Filmmakers Richard Lavoie (Charles Daudelin) and Isabelle de Bois are also shooting Tous les enfants du monde, five half-hours about the lives of young kids in Africa, South America and the Canadian Arctic. DECODE will distribute, and is coproducing all but the first episode. Each ep will cost $300,000.

Mad about who?

The Madness of King Richard is Barry Avrich’s new one-hour profile of Richard Monette, the longtime artistic director of The Stratford Festival. Avrich (Guilty Pleasure) will city-hop between Toronto, New York and Montreal this summer, talking to festival alums such as Paul Newman and Christopher Plummer about the eccentric stage vet.

‘He’s tremendously creative and, um, colorful,’ says Avrich, who exec produces along with Nat Brescia (Guilty Pleasure) and Victoria Hockin (Guilty Pleasure). The ‘mid-budget’ doc is backed by a Bravo! licence fee and the international rights have already been picked up by Myriad Films. Dennis Takacs will cut and deliver in time to air in 2004.

Avrich’s next and ‘way bigger’ doc is Dirty Hands. Working from the 1998 Hector Feliciano book Lost Museum, Avrich will dig into the international black market, tracking down paintings and objets d’art that were stolen by Nazis in WWII. He is in talks with three major U.S. cablers and plans to shoot next year.

Two toons at Spin

Toronto’s Spin Entertainment and CEO Norm Stangl have inked two development deals with Teletoon and, by fall, will deliver character designs, scripts and production bibles for would-be series Delores Deadhead and Fugget About It.

Exec producer and director Colin Davies is heading up Delores, a 3D animated tween comedy about monsters in a rock band, flanked by Strangl and Neishaw Ali, who also exec produce. Alex Garlick and Richard Elliot are at work on the scripts and, if greenlit, production on 26 half-hours could start this fall. Talks are also underway with an unnamed French copro partner, says Stangl.

The same team is also at work on the older-targeted Fugget About It with help from copro partner Darius Films. Darius’s Nicholas Tabarrok and Will Wennekers came up with the idea for the 2D cartoon – about a New York mob family relocated, by the witness protection program, to Canada – and asked Spin to turn out the actual footage, in hopes of a 26 x 30 order. Development will cost roughly $60,000 per series, backed by development fees.