Montreal: Principal photography goes through to Feb. 19 on the David Bailey paranormal suspense feature The Intruder. The $7.6 million shoot stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nastassja Kinski, John Hanna and Canadian actors Molly Parker, Marianne Theriault and Charles Powell.

Bailey, a leading international stills photographer, directed the primetime doc Models for Channel 4, but The Intruder is his first feature.

GFT Kingsborough producer Pieter Kroonenburg says the director and dop Jean Lepine have hit it off rather well. Lepine was dop on two earlier Kroonenburg pictures, Habitat, coproduced with Claude Leger, and the Kenyan adventure To Walk With Lions.

In this story, penned by Jamie Brown, the film’s London, Eng.-based producer, the ‘lives’ of two women – one murdered two years ago and the other still living – intersect in a kind of time warp.

Patricia Christie is production designer and Nicole Pelletier is costume designer. The crew is from the stcvq and casting is by Elite Productions.

London-based Entco, headed by president Thierry Wase Bailey, has international rights. France Film has all Canadian rights.

Kroonenburg and the film’s exec producer Gary Howsam, who recently left Greenlight, have put together a multi-film production package for ’99.

*Renewal plans for Radio Active

Productions Tele-Action reports youth specialty broadcaster ytv plans to renew the adapted teen sitcom Radio Active for a second season. The first 26 half-hours debut Monday, Feb. 1 (repeated the following Saturday), with taping of episodes 17 to 26 ongoing in front of a live PMT Studio audience Wednesdays through to March 10.

Tele-Action producer Colin Neale says ytv ‘likes the show very much,’ and happily, cbc has optioned a second window.

Adapted from Tele-Action’s Radio Enfer, greenlit for a fifth season (130 half-hours) on French-language Canal Famille, Radio Active tracks teen life in a high school radio station and is aimed at the early teen set, 11 to 15.

Writers for the adapted series include The Vestibules comedy team of Terence Bowman, Bernard Deniger and Paul Pare, and Jennifer Seguin. Claudio Luca (Big Bear), Martine Allard and Neale are producing. Peter Moss is vp programming at ytv.

Radio Active’s budget is just under $2 million. Telefilm Canada, the Canadian Television Fund and the Independent Production Fund are among the investors. The exporter is Distribution Cine Tele-Action.

Tele-Action coproduced the cbc miniseries Big Bear, directed by Gil Cardinal. Unconfirmed reports place the first-night (Jan. 3) audience in the 960,000 range. Big Bear won two awards at the recent American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco and is slated to screen at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Jan. 21-31.

*Head stars in Serpent

Musician and noted francophile Murray Head plays Tom Paradise, a weary, work-a-day bus driver obsessed with adventure (a la Kerouac’s On the Road ) in the second Yves Dion feature film, Le Grand Serpent du monde. Tom’s life is turned upside down when he meets Anais, a seductive younger woman played by Zoe Latraverse. Louise Portal and Gabriel Arcand also star.

The movie is one of those rarest of exceptions – a drama from the National Film Board’s French Programme and producer Monique Letourneau with funding from Tele-Quebec and pay-tv movie channel Super Ecran.

It premiers Feb. 16 as part of the Rendez-vous du cinema quebecois program and will be released in theaters in Montreal Feb. 19 and Quebec City Feb. 26.

Carole Boudreault of Alex Films and Julie Huguet of the nfb are the film’s distribution consultants.

Craft credits go to dop Paul van der Linden, editor Monique Fortier, art director Gaudeline Sauriol, and Audio Z musicians Serge Laforest and Gaetan Gravel.

Dion is a 30-year veteran of the nfb whose earlier editing credits include Claude Jutra’s Wow, Pierre Harel’s Bulldozer and Michel Brault’s Les Ordres. Dramatic director credits include L’Homme renverse (1986) and Le Vendredi de Jeanne Robinson (1990).

Monique Proulx wrote the screenplay for Le Grand Serpent. Proulx (Le Coeur de poing, Le Sexe des etoiles) and director Jean Beaudin cowrote Beaudin’s latest feature, the soon-to-be-released Souvenirs d’intimes, which is based on the Proulx novel L’Homme a la fenetre.

*Lost World gets serial treatment

A distribution agreement between Telescene Film Group and The Fremantle Corp. has triggered a production deal for a minimum of 20 one-hour episodes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Production is slated for Australia this spring.

Budgeted at close to $4 million, a two-hour movie/pilot shot under the Action Adventure Network banner completed principal photography on location in Australia last fall under the direction of Richard Franklin. Telescene and Village Roadshow Pictures produced in association with St. Claire Entertainment.

The mow premiers on DirecTv Feb. 1, with the series going to air sometime in July. aan will distribute in North America. Fremantle has international other than the u.s.

Lost World is based on an exec producer deal between Telescene and John Landis and Leslie Belzberg of St. Claire. Telescene has also signed aan pilot/series agreements with u.k. horrormeister Clive Barker, Richard Donner and director/producer Roger Donaldson.

aan is a $200-million-plus u.s coventure established by Telescene, Richmel Productions and Goodman/Rosen Productions. All aan projects premier on DirecTv and are either produced or coproduced by Telescene.

*FIFA gears up

Painter Jean-Pierre Riopelle is honorary president of the 17th edition of Festival International du Film sur l’Art (International Art Film Festival), being held in various Montreal venues March 9-14.

fifa director Rene Rozon has programmed 150 films from 25 countries including the opening night film, Peter Rosen’s The Museum on the Mountain, the Lea Pool doc Gabrielle Roy and Carlos Ferrand’s Visionairies. Daniel Langlois of The Langlois Foundation and Terra Incognito is the host of an as yet unspecified festival avant-premiere event. fifa produces a poster and indexed catalogue.

*A Winter Visitor

Hollywood legends James Garner and Julie Andrews, in Montreal shooting the made-for-cbs romance drama A Winter Visitor, recently showed up on Hockey Night in Canada (cbc) while attending a Montreal Canadiens match. (The two actors appeared together in The Americanization of Emily in 1964 and in the 1982 comedy Victor/Victoria.)

In A Winter Visitor, Andrews plays a pediatric cardiologist stranded with a rich building contractor (Garner) in a remote cabin during a paralyzing snow storm.

Roger Young is directing. Films Balzac and Green/Epstein Productions are the producers. Casting, including the search for photo doubles for both leads, is by Andrea Kenyon and Associates. Filming in Montreal wraps Feb. 5.