The long road traveled by Colleen Murphy’s feature film desire to its just-wrapped Winnipeg shoot began two years ago in Germany at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival.

Toronto screenwriter/director Murphy and producer Elizabeth Yake of production company Subjective Eye, were screening their second film Shoemaker at the 1997 edition of the German festival, where it scooped up a number of awards. They were also shopping the second draft of desire, a love story about a young musician in his mid-20s who never quite makes it as the concert pianist he dreams of becoming. He falls in love with an older elementary teacher, but the relationship ends tragically when she discovers a secret about the young man.

Yake and Murphy showed the script to Eberhard Junkersdorf and Dietmar Guntsche of Munich-based Bioskop Film, which came on board to coproduce and brought broadcaster zdf to the table.

Last March, while another draft was being worked on, Yake was asked to sit on a panel at the Local Heroes International Screen Festival in Winnipeg.

‘I was enticed by Manitoba Film and Sound to consider shooting [in Manitoba],’ explains Yake. The province offers a tax rebate of 35% as well as equity investment funding.

Manitoba Film and Sound put Yake in touch with local producer Phyllis Laing of Buffalo Gal Pictures and the company came on as an additional coproducer. ‘Our focus is on creatively driven projects from writer/directors, so this project was a great fit,’ says Laing. desire marks the first Canada/Germany coproduction for Manitoba.

The collaboration eventually spanned three provinces and an ocean. The team behind the project consists of Laing (Winnipeg), Yake (Toronto) and Bioskop (Munich) as producers, with Kathy Avrich Johnson of Toronto and Nicole Robert of Montreal as executive producers.

desire was originally set in a nondescript mid-sized city, but Murphy scouted locations and found that Winnipeg fit the bill. She then began the process of restructuring the script to a Winnipeg locale.

The stars of desire include German actress Katja Riemann and Canadian Zachary Bennett, with supporting roles going to Graham Greene (Dances With Wolves), Alberta Watson (The Sweet Hereafter), Elizabeth Shepherd, Maggie Huculak, Germany’s Joost Siedhoff, and Winnipeg’s Victor Cowie.

Financing from the German end rang in at 50% of the total budget. In Canada, funding came from Telefilm Canada, the Harold Greenberg Fund, Manitoba Film & Sound and the Manitoba and federal tax credit programs. In Germany, zdf took a broadcast window, and Warner Bros. picked up distribution rights in German-speaking territories. The Canadian coproducers brought TMN-The Movie Network in as the pay-tv window. Specialty channel Showcase, which usually only acquires finished films long after national broadcast rights have already been exploited, took a first-window presale.

Five weeks of principal photography have just been completed on location in and around Winnipeg with a local crew of 60. Editing lands in Ontario under Jeff Warren, who worked on Such A Long Journey, and some post-production will go to Germany. The producers are aiming for a film festival premiere for desire and will begin looking for a foreign sales agent at mipcom in October.