Montreal: u.s. actor Alec Baldwin has signed on as the lead in the four-hour docudrama miniseries Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial. The $18-million shoot begins principal photography in Montreal June 21 for 10 weeks and is a coproduction between Alliance Atlantis Communications and Productions La Fete in association with British American of the u.k.

La Fete producer Suzanne Girard says it’s great to be working with aac, which has some equity in La Fete. The Toronto-based pubco hasn’t done anything in Montreal since Johnny Mnemonic. ‘Let’s hope we’ll do more because those guys are competent and straightforward,’ says Girard, producer on the a&e miniseries P.T. Barnum.

Nuremberg is slated for a summer 2000 broadcast on Turner Network Television.

In Nuremberg, Baldwin plays Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who takes a leave of absence to prosecute 21 members of the Nazi high command.

The show is based on the nonfiction book of the same title by Joseph E. Persico. David Rintels did the adaptation and Yves Simoneau (Free Money) is slated to direct. Simoneau’s 36 Hours to Die, produced by Coscient, performed very well on its recent tnt premiere.

Girard says the story covers the first major post-war trial in 1946 and is not a remake of the Spencer Tracy classic Judgment at Nuremberg.

Guy Lalande (Joseph Bonanno) is the production designer and Alain Dostie (The Red Violin) is the dop. Girard, Mychele Boudrias and aac’s Ian McDougall are producing. Exec producers include Jon Cornick, Gerry Abrams and aac’s l.a. chief Peter Sussman.

*Jeux d’Ombres’ Mechant Party

One of the younger production ensembles to get a green light for a feature film this spring from the Quebec operations office at Telefilm Canada is Jeux d’Ombres. The house is completing financing on Mario Chabot’s debut feature Mechant Party, says producer Anne-Marie Gelinas.

Gelinas says it makes sense that the funding agencies encourage younger producers as the old guard prepares to consider retirement. ‘And it seems that another thing that is new is that they [the agencies] are willing to analyze films [based] on their merit, and not just on who’s behind it.’

Gelinas very much wants to shoot on a $1.3-million budget, and to get there will need more funds from sodec and the lfp. The balance of funding comes from the combined tax credits (20.25% and 4.11%), Telefilm’s $340,000 eip investment, $125,000 from presales to Tele-Quebec and Super Ecran, and an advance from distributor Film Tonic. The five-week shoot is set for Aug. 15.

Alexis Martin (Un 32 Aout sur Terre), Lise Dion and Catherine Senart are slated to star in Mechant Party, a comedy about some of the strange things that happen when a man on his way to a Halloween party picks up an unsavory hitchhiker.

Chabot (Le feu au coeur) wrote the screenplay with a little help from Sylvie Pilon (L’Homme Ideal).

The house is completing filming (May 25 to June 3) on another small-budget movie, Simon Lacombe’s Cadence, starring Patrick Labbe, Marie-France Marcotte and Marcel Sabourin.

Le Gout des Jeunes Filles, a feature film based on a screenplay by novelist Dany Laferriere, with early interest from Behaviour Distribution, is being prepped to shoot in Haiti next year.

On the doc front, Jeux d’Ombres produced Oh Mother! (’98), a story of three generations of mothers from directors Sara Morley and Sandra Dametto, and is now prepping for a June-July shoot in England on a new 90-minute Morley doc, Teatime with Nell and Charles. Oh Mother! was sold to wtn. Cinema Libre has Canadian rights. Pixcom International has export.

Jeux d’Ombres partners are dop Salvatore Barrera, Andrew Noble, Morley and Gelinas. They have produced two features, Andre Turpin’s Zigrail (’95) and Eugene Garcia’s Burnt Eden (’97), the latter on a budget of $360,000.

*Symbol of the North

Coscient Group’s large-format film subsidiary, SDA Panorama, is filming its first imax production, Symbol of the North.

The film is a celebration of the rugged and still largely uncharted polar region, its people and principal migratory animals, says Andre Picard, president of SDA Panorama.

Filming goes over one full year, kicking off last fall in Northern Quebec and the Labrador coast, just in time for the caribou rutting season. Footage on the Inuit people and scenes of the caribou’s winter migration were shot last month, with the filmmakers returning to the North in June to record the birth of baby caribou. The month of July is set aside to record the overwhelming masses of arctic mosquitoes and for some landscape photography in the remote Porngat mountains of northern Labrador.

‘At the end of August we’re going to Sweden (above the Arctic circle) for three weeks,’ says producer Martin J. Dignard. ‘The unit has to be very small because 75% of the time we have to travel by helicopter. We were eight [filmmakers] altogether last month.’

The 42-minute film is being directed by Bill Reeve, who is also the cinematographer. The sound recordist is Leon Johnson from Winnipeg.

Symbol of the North was written by Georges-Hebert Germain in collaboration with novelist David Homel and Saami documentary filmmaker John E. Utsi. Picard and Desiree Edmar of the Swedish Museum of Natural History are the exec producers.

Picard is a former vp film with Imax Corp. His producer credits include Rolling Stones at the Max (the first-ever large-format feature), Titanica and Oscar-nominated Fires of Kuwait. He is also coproducing Journey of Man, a 3D imax film featuring the Cirque du Soleil.

Symbol of the North is budgeted at $5.5 million and will be released to imax theatres in June 2000. The film is produced in association with the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Imagica Corporation of Japan, Tourisme Quebec, the St-Felicien Zoo and the Nunavik Tourism Association. Hydro-Quebec is the film’s principal sponsor. Iridium and Chlorophylle are also sponsors.

SDA Panorama’s principal investment partner is Capital Communications cdpq, a subsidiary of the Caisse de depot du Quebec.

Coscient Group retains worldwide distribution rights to Symbol of the North.

*Banff is Krals’ homecoming

Montreal filmmaker Bobbi Jo Krals is headed to the Banff Television Festival, June 13-19, where she’ll pitch a one-hour doc called Shrinkage at the festival’s popular international market simulation session.

An irreverent, offbeat look at society’s aversion to talking about mental health, the film features Sherry Shaw-Froggatt, a stand-up comic and mom who shares her own experience with depression. Shaw-Froggatt is scheduled to perform at the festival’s Comedy Cabaret.

Krals’ production house, Esperanto, and Abby Neidik and Irene Angelico of DLI Productions (The Cola Wars) are developing Coming on Strong, a doc on the professional women’s tennis tour in the year 2000, while Krals and Robbie Hart of Montreal’s Adobe Productions are shooting Nos Amours, chronicling the fate of the Montreal Expos baseball club.

Krals was the director and coproducer, along with Hart, on the half-hour documentary A Calling to Care, a portrait of 55-year-old Calgary nurse Grace Stanley who left a prestigious career to teach in Pakistan. The $127,000 film was shot on location over one week in Pakistan and has been sold to Vision tv, cbc’s Man Alive, scn and wtn. The Canadian Television Fund and Canadian International Development Agency provided funding.

Krals won’t soon forget her directorial debut voyage to Pakistan. Her journalist visa wasn’t approved until 24 hours before departure, a drag when you’re holding $10,000 in non-refundable airline tickets. The crew was later held up at gun point during filming, and if that wasn’t enough, Krals and another woman were shaken down by cops who stopped their taxi. Later, after four Americans were gunned down in broad daylight, the Canadian embassy in Karachi issued a warning that the film crew was not to leave their hotel for at least two days.

A Calling to Care was recently awarded a ’99 Bronze Apple at the National Education Media Network TV Festival in Oakland, Calif. Krals moved to Montreal from Edmonton three years ago.

*New film shoots

New film shoots slated to begin principal photography in May as reported by the stcvq include the Cinequest Films feature The List. Sylvain Guy, screenwriter on the Jean-Marc Valee thriller Liste Noire, is directing and Shimon Dotan and Marcel Giroux are producing. Filming is slated to go from May 26 to June 20.

Producers Murray Shostak and Alain Gagnon are prepping on a new Christopher Leitch feature, Satan’s School For Girls. It’s set for a May 30 startup.