Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal Pictures is wrapping its second consecutive Manitoba/Ontario coproduction, while a third joint venture with a Toronto company begins preproduction.

Desire, a feature film from the Ontario-based writer/director team of Colleen Murphy and producer Elizabeth Yake, finished principal photography mid-September in Winnipeg, just as Buffalo Gal began preproduction on The Law of Enclosures, produced with Damon D’Oliveira and John Greyson’s Pluck Pictures. Next up is the tv movie Children of My Heart, a partnership with Tapestry Films of Toronto, which is prepping for a late November start at the newly opened Prairie Production Centre soundstage.

While Buffalo Gal’s reputation as an award-winning production company specializing in high-quality, auteur-driven projects sealed the deals, it was Manitoba’s equity investment program coupled with a 35% tax credit that brought the Toronto producers calling.

‘In Ontario it’s very difficult to find that last 25% of the budget because there isn’t any equity investment,’ says D’Oliveira, whose past credits include Rude and h.

‘What you are seeing is a growing trend – there’s a lack of support in Ontario so producers have to ship out to other provinces to fill the financing gap.’

Manitoba Film & Sound Recording Development Corporation offers equity investments and/or interest-free recoupable advances of 20% of the total budget or 30% of the portion of the Manitoba expenditure – whichever is less. Support for features and mows is capped at $400,000. Ontario, meanwhile, offers only a 20% tax credit calculated on the lesser of Ontario labor expenditures and 48% of the eligible cost of the production. No equity program is available.

Beyond the financial incentive in Manitoba – without which The Law of Enclosures would have been delayed in the search to complete the budget – D’Oliveira does not downplay the importance of finding the right company to partner with.

‘We certainly did not want to do this film with just any company,’ he says. ‘We were looking for the right fit when it came to a coproducer. We definitely would not take this project to a service-oriented company – it’s not that kind of film.’

The producers add that they did not sacrifice in terms of crew by moving the project to Winnipeg.

‘This is a top crew,’ says Greyson, ‘maybe better than what we could get in Toronto because this is a low-budget film and top Toronto crews are so in demand and expensive.’

Furthermore, Greyson adds, many of the crew members are indie filmmakers themselves. ‘It’s fun to debate camera angles with the craft services people.’

Fans of New York writer Dale Peck, fellow Canadian Film Centre grads D’Oliveira and Greyson optioned his novel The Law of Enclosures in February 1998. A portrait of a husband and wife, the story is revealed by cutting back and forth between the couple’s first year and their last year together, 45 years later.

‘The novel really haunted me – which is surprising since it doesn’t have any connection to the previous films I have made,’ says Greyson, who directed the Genie Award-winning Lilies, in which prisoners take a bishop hostage and force him to watch their reenactment of a love triangle between three teenage boys; Zero Patience, a musical debunking the myths surrounding the introduction of aids to North America; and Uncut, which mixes the unlikely subject materials of Pierre Trudeau, circumcision, alphabets and copyright.

‘I am mostly known for doing gay stories, and here’s a film about a very ordinary couple, Henry and Beatrice. We joke about it and say this is my first straight film,’ he says of Law of Enclosures.

But in quintessential Greyson style, the storyline is not quite as simple as it sounds. The twist to the tale is that the storylines of the younger and older versions of the couple both take place in 1991. Visual images play up the misconstrued sense of time. For example, as a young and elderly couple, Beatrice and Henry drive a Delta 88. The Gulf War is the leading news item on television when they are 20 years old and when they are 65.

‘It is never explained why time is stuck,’ says Greyson, who adapted the script, with collaboration from the author.

‘This conceit opens up a way to talk about how we become our parents even though we think we are so much more evolved than they are,’ he explains.

‘We think that our parents got stuck because they grew up in the ’50s and because we grew up in the ’80s we are so much more sophisticated. The story is a reminder that no matter how modern we think we are, we can get just as emotionally stuck as our parents.’

Greyson changed the Long Island setting of the novel to Sarnia to Canadianize the script and, furthermore, because Sarnia is the petro-chemical capital of Canada and close to the u.s. border, it fit with the storyline’s tie-in to the Gulf War and the oil processing industry. Visually, Sarnia provides the contradictions of an industrial city with the serene beauty of a long winding river.

When Phyllis Laing of Buffalo Gal showed interest in coproducing The Law of Enclosures and a commitment was secured from Manitoba Film and Sound, the producers decided to shoot almost entirely in Winnipeg, while keeping the setting of Sarnia.

‘Winnipeg has a malleable quality – it could be any place,’ says D’Oliveira. ‘We are playing up the industrial side of Winnipeg with the choice of locations and will cover the key Sarnia landmarks with two days of second unit.’

In addition to the Manitoba Film and Sound equity, the $2-million project received support from Telefilm Canada, The Harold Greenberg Fund, and the federal, Manitoba and Ontario tax credit programs. Odeon Films is handling domestic and foreign distribution.

The project has snagged Sarah Polley, most recently seen on screen in Guinevere and Go, and Brendan Fletcher (The Five Senses, Rollercoaster) to play the younger version of the couple. Diane Ladd (Wild at Heart, Ghosts of Mississippi) and Sean McCann (Affliction) play their older counterparts. Shirley Douglas also plays a key role.

Greyson says he is continually being asked if this film will have the visual richness of Lilies.

‘This is a completely different film,’ he says. ‘I am working on a level of naturalism and realism which I have never done before. There’s a pleasure to putting a contemporary story about very ordinary people on screen. It’s a departure from Lilies, which was so fantastic and romantic and literary. This film is based on gritty realism.’