Montreal: Shooting on the John N. Smith movie adaptation of the Michel Tremblay stage play Les Belles-Soeurs began in Saint John, NB March 24. The New Brunswick leg continues over six weeks, with filming moving to Montreal the second week of May.

Jane Curtin (Third Rock From the Sun, Antz) plays Geraldine, the central character in a screwball, character-driven social comedy about a group of women obsessed with Geraldine’s appearance on a TV game show called Bring Home the Bacon.

Mary Walsh (This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Mambo Italiano) plays Geraldine’s sister Rose. Other players include Patrick McKenna in the role of Louis, Rose’s hushand, Sheila McCarthy, Pascale Montpetit, Monique Mercure, Marina Orsini, Peter MacNeill and Matt Frewer.

The adaptation is set in Saint John, while Tremblay’s play, staged in some 40 countries over the past three decades, portrays a group of Montreal working-class ladies obsessed with stamp-collecting.

Belles-Soeurs is a $6.1-million Quebec/New Brunswick coproduction between Montreal-based Cite-Amerique producers Lorraine Richard (Seraphin, Dice) and Greg Dummett and Sam Grana (Never Too Late, The Boys of St. Vincent) of Moncton’s Grana Productions. The screenplay is by L.A.-based writer Tim Burns (Jacob Two Two Meets the Hooded Fang, An American Werewolf in Paris), based on the stage-play adaptation by U.K. writer Chris Manby.

Cite-Amerique has gained a lot of experience coproducing with East Coast partners. Cite-Amerique producer Louis Laverdiere and Grana teamed last year on the $4.5-million Radio-Canada miniseries Samuel, and earlier Richard coproduced the $16-million CBC epic Random Passage, also directed by Smith (Revenge of the Land, Dangerous Minds, The Boys of St. Vincent), with Passage Films of St. John’s, NF and Irish partners.

Madeleine Henrie is the shoot’s supervising producer and Renee Gosselin is PM. Pierre Letarte, winner of the 2002 Gemini Award for best photography for Random Passage, is the cinematographer and Jean-Baptiste Tard is the art director.

Funding sources include Telefilm Canada, SODEC, The Harold Greenberg Fund, The Movie Network, New Brunswick Film and the New Brunswick, Quebec and federal tax-credit programs.

A Canada-wide release by Seville Pictures is slated for February 2004.

New slate from La Fete

La Fete Productions president and CEO Rock Demers and producer Chantal Lafleur are preparing to shoot Jean-Claude Lord’s Dan, Dad and the Superdogs, the fifth entry in La Fete’s second collection of Tales for All family films. ‘It’s our most ambitious project to date, a $7-million budget to be shot in both French and English,’ says Demers.

The new wave of Tales for All films (16 in the initial collection) includes My Little Devil, a coproduction with NFDC of India; Roger Cantin’s The Hidden Fortress; the musical Regina; and Bernd Neuberger’s F/X fantasy-adventure Summer with the Ghosts. Ghosts was lensed by Thomas Vamos and coproduced with Austria on a budget of $3.6 million. It’s slated for a summer ’03 release. La Fete has international rights to all the films.

Demers is especially proud of the yet-to-be-released Madame Brouette, a majority La Fete feature film coproduction with Senegal and France, and a Silver Bear winner (for music) at last month’s Berlinale.

Other new projects include the Jean Beaudry feature Un grand bonhomme de chemin, inspired by the life and work of filmmaker Claude Jutra, and the CBC TV movie Barrie Tales, to be produced in association with Ronald Gilbert.

‘And we have another film in post-production which will be a masterpiece,’ says Demers, referring to Philippe Baylaucq’s one-hour documentary history Sable Island. ‘That’s a place that has had 100 shipwrecks and is full of ghosts.’ Sable Island was produced for $1 million and is commissioned by CBC, Tele-Quebec and TV5.

In TV, La Fete and producer Ina Fichman are currently shooting Romancing the Bean, a three-hour world history of coffee commissioned by TVOntario and TFO, PBS/KCTS and Historia. Fichman is also producing Howard Goldberg’s Being Dorothy, a one-hour documentary special for CBC, and Trading Places (working title), a new half-hour kids doc series for YTV, Discovery Kids and TFO.

Active in the industry for over 40 years, Demers was a popular choice for this year’s Prix Jutra career tribute award. His films have won two Golden Reel box-office awards – Tadpole and the Whale in 1987 and La Guerre des Tuques in 1984.

Demers has been honored by film festivals around the world and has received many prestigious awards over the years, including the Prix Albert-Tessier in 1987, Prix Francois-Truffaut, the Governor-General’s Performing Arts Award in 1998 and the Banff Television Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Duigan helms Remstar romance

Principal photography started March 19 and continues to May 14 in Montreal on the John Duigan feature film Head in the Clouds, with additional location filming in Paris and London later in May. The production is using the 30,000-square-foot interior backlot at Ice Storm Studios, rebuilt for Paris locations.

Scripted by Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting), Head in the Clouds stars Charlize Theron (The Cider House Rules, The Astronaut’s Wife), Penelope Cruz (Blow, Vanilla Sky), Stuart Townsend (Queen of the Damned) and Thomas Kretchmann (The Pianist).

Set in 1930s England, the Spanish Civil War and the last days of the Nazi occupation of Paris, the film follows a young Cambridge student (Townsend) whose world is changed forever by a passionate affair with a hedonistic photographer (Theron). The two actors were matched as lovers in the Luis Mandoki action-thriller Trapped (2002), distributed by Columbia Pictures/Sony.

Craft credits on the $26-million production go to DOP Paul Sarossy (The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction), picture editor Dominique Fortin (Tomorrow Never Dies, Sunshine), production designer Jonathan Lee (Elizabeth), art director Gilles Aird, costume designer Mario Davignon (Romeo + Juliet) and supervising producer Pierre Laberge.

Head in the Clouds is crewed by the STCVQ and produced by Montreal-based Remstar and producers Maxime Remillard, Andre Rouleau and Bertil Ohlsson (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Amadeus).

Last year, Remillard, Remstar chairman, coproduced the big-budget TV miniseries Dangerous Liaisons, starring Catherine Deneuve and Rupert Everett. Remstar also picked up Canadian distrib rights to the feature Aime ton Pere, starring the father and son team of Gerard and Guillaume Depardieu, and the TV miniseries biography Jean Moulin, both coproduced by Montreal’s Transfilm.

The company’s first major coproduction, with Seven Arts, is the Bob Rafelson noir thriller The House on Turk Street (aka No Good Deed), the movie adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett short story. It stars Milla Jovovich and Samuel L. Jackson (The Red Violin, Rules of Engagement) and is slated for a fall 2003 release by Alliance Atlantis and a yet-to-be-named U.S. studio, says Remillard.

AAC will also release Head in the Clouds under the new Remstar/Alliance Atlantis distribution pact.