Pitch is tracking new projects for various directing, producing and acting talent attending this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Reginald Harkema, a Vancouver-based, Genie-nominated editor (Last Night, Hard Core Logo, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) will direct the feature A Girl Is A Girl for Christine Haebler’s Cadence Entertainment.

Production is slated for February in Vancouver and Citytv has prebought the film in a deal inked at the festival. Diane Boehme, manager of independent production at City, made the prebuy. ‘Now we’ve got that first card for the foundation of our financing house of cards,’ says Harkema.

With Haebler executive producing, Christina Margellos will produce Harkema’s script, cowritten with Angus Fraser, who received a Gemini nomination as cowriter on Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed.

A Girl Is A Girl concerns protagonist Adam’s search for true love in a milieu of anorexia, peer pressure, date rape, pot smoking, supermodels, alcohol, grrl punk and ecstasy.

Besides trying to shore up financing and a distribution deal while at the Toronto International Film Festival, Harkema says he has been consulting with David Cronenberg on how to shoot nude scenes. Andy Hoffman

*MacFadden has Colonel By

It is an epic story with a questionable hero, a man whose dogged determination to build the Rideau Canal and open up eastern Ontario eventually led to Ottawa being declared the capital of Canada. But not before hundreds of workers died from malaria, many hectares of land were expropriated from angry farmers, and the man at the helm was called back to England in disgrace for, among other things, overrunning costs.

It is the story of Lieutenant-Colonel John By, a hacking-through-the-wilderness tale that has danced in the mind and played in the heart of Ottawa producer Josephine MacFadden for nearly two decades. (In 1984, she completed a documentary on the man called John By: Hero Without Honour.)

At this year’s tiff, MacFadden, president of Communicado Associates, hopes her project will finally come to fruition. With $30,000 in development money already safely tucked away in her purse from the National Capital Commission, the National Arts Centre, and a handful of other local sponsors, MacFadden is looking for heavyweight financial support to prop up the feature film’s $3-million budget.

She says she’s pitched the documentary to the bigwigs at the cbc, the bbc, British Screen as well as Alliance, which, in an ideal world, will handle distribution, she says. And, she confides, ‘they’ve all indicated they’re interested’ and are just waiting for the script.

The historical drama entitled The Water Man is still at the development stage, says MacFadden, with the primary treatment completed by John Sifton. ‘It’s so well laid out and structured at this point,’ she says, ‘that all we really need to do is fill in the dialogue.’

MacFadden says she expects the script to be completed by November and hopes to have all the funding in place by December so that shooting could wrap up next year.

With support from Ottawa 2000 (the organization responsible for organizing millennium celebrations), MacFadden is gunning for a delivery date of fall 2000. Friends of Bytown is acting as marketing agents and fundraising. Amber Nasrulla

*Sexton and House pitching Violet

Producer Mary Sexton and director/writer Rosemary House are in Toronto from Newfoundland to pitch their film Violet. Margot Kidder is attached to the $1.7-million project about a woman who, having just turned 55, is convinced she’ll die. (It’s a family curse; everyone has died at 55.)

While it sounds depressing, House says cheerily that it’s ‘a comedy about death.’ They already have a $60,000 licence fee from TMN-The Movie Network and they’re pitching wic, cbc and CTV Halifax. They’re also pitching to Motion International, Alliance and Red Sky for distribution.

Sexton’s credits include producing Dooley Gardens and House’s credits include Rain, Drizzle and Fog. Meg Mathur

Lawrence and Souther’s own Inciting Incidents

writing duo Teza Lawrence and Michael Souther’s screenplay reading workshop Inciting Incident runs tonight on the Roof Salon of the Grand Bay Hotel (Park Plaza) with Ken Hegan’s The Deadline.

The successful series of workshops featuring high-end talent reading feature scripts is organized and produced by Lawrence and Souther. In the past, Inciting Incident has led to a distribution advance from Behaviour for Gerry Ciccoritti’s Wives of Bath project and Telefilm Canada development money for Mike McGowan’s Over The Falls.

But while spending much of their time and efforts lately helping bring attention to other writer’s projects, the duo has a bunch of projects of their own that they are developing.

In October, they are hoping to shoot the short Patty burns, with Souther directing his own script and Lawrence producing. Patty Burns is about a woman who sets her apartment on fire to meet her neighbors.

On the feature front, Joe Batt’s Arm is a Newfoundland homecoming story, while Terrance is described as a family entertainment kids’ adventure film.

Repped by Carl Liberman of The Characters Talent Agency, Lawrence and Souther are still in development with Toronto’s Shaftesbury Pictures on their script Galapagos, a family film about a 300-year-old tortoise whose instincts lead to buried treasure. Andy Hoffman

*Edge has Impossible Elephant

Edge Entertainment of Saskatoon celebrated the screening of its feature The Summer of the Monkeys Sunday night at Prego, which brought out the acting, writing and producing crowd from the Prairies.

Lots of buzz at the party about the launch of a Saskatchewan international film festival. Patricia Rop, a Saskatoon city councillor, and Chris Jones, owner of Saskatchewan’s independent Broadway Theatre, are behind the effort.

Edge president David Doerkson took advantage of his party to pitch his next feature to Sullivan Entertainment’s home video arm, which released Summer of the Monkeys. The film is titled The Impossible Elephant and is written by Robert Cooper, a former Stargate editor.

It’s the story of a kid who wants to impress his school friends by searching for a really big show-and-tell project.’ The $5.3-million film does not have a director attached. Cheryl Binning

*Barkin’s Apartment Hunting

Alcina Pictures’ Paul Barkin has landed a presale deal with cbc for the $1-million feature Apartment Hunting. The writer/director is Bill Robertson, who made The Events Leading Up To My Death, which screened at tiff in 1992.

The romantic comedy centers on a guy who, while trying to save his marriage, accidentally falls in love with another woman he has only talked to on the phone.

Executive producers are Sienna Films’ Julia Sereny and Jennifer Kawaja. Alliance is on board to distribute. The Harold Greenberg Fund was tapped for development dollars. Cheryl Binning

*Next Wave shopping The Following

More than a hundred people were turned away from the first public screening of Christopher Nolan’s first feature The Following, produced with the financial aid of the Independent Film Channel’s Next Wave Films. Some were even walking up and down the lineup with ‘Following tickets wanted’ signs. So Next Wave’s president Peter Broderick, who is repping the project, has added another public screening today at 9:30 a.m.

This is the second film to receive Next Wave finishing funds.

The Following is a psychological thriller about a writer obsessed with following strangers. Nolan, who recently moved from London, Eng. to l.a., wrote, directed and shot the film on Saturdays over the course of a year. The producers are Emma Thomas, Jeremy Theobald (who also stars) and Nolan.

Nolan has two projects in the works. Memento is based on a short story written by his brother Jon. The thriller revolves around a guy investigating his wife’s murder. The spin is that he has severe short-term memory loss, a bit of a difficulty no doubt when you are heading up a murder investigation. An l.a. company called Newmarket has optioned the script.

Nolan is also adapting the Ruth Rendell novel The Keys to the Street, to be produced by Gail Mutrux for Fox Searchlight. The thriller is set in London’s Regent Park and is about a young woman who leaves an abusive relationship and becomes involved with a mysterious young man.