Montreal: Claude Fournier is directing a sterling cast in the 10-hour Rose Films series Juliette Pomerleau, adapted from Yves Beauchemin’s best-selling novel. Leads include Brigitte Boucher, Macha Grenon, William Honce and Benoit Briere.

Published here by Quebec-Amerique and in France by Bernard de Fallois, the novel gained international attention over the past decade, selling more than 600,000 copies in France alone, says producer Marie-Jose Raymond.

Juliette Pomerleau is slated for broadcast on tva in early 1999 and tells a contemporary, funny and emotional story of a hugely proportioned lady, Juliette, played by Boucher, who inherits responsibility for a young nephew, played by Honce. The storyline evolves over one eventful summer and chronicles Juliette’s illness and search for the boy’s lost mother, Adele, played by Grenon.

Juliette’s fevered fantasies assume prescient dimensions rendered in dreamlike visual effects by digital studio Hybride Technologies.

Gemeaux-winning actor Briere plays a photographer and Adele’s love interest. Theatre du Nouveau Monde’s Lorraine Pintal makes a rare tv appearance as Juliette’s nasty sister, Elvina, and ‘the bad French guy’ is French actor Aurelien Recoing.

Serge Dupire, Albert Millaire, Dan Bigras, Donald Pilon, Dino Tavarone, Janine Sutto, Andree Champagne, Francis Reddy, Jean Marchand, Sophie Faucher, Linda Roy, Normand Levesque and musical talents Diane Dufresne and Zachary Richard are also featured. Montreal Symphony Orchestra artistic director/conductor Charles Dutoit is appropriately cast as the maestro.

Studio sequences were shot over 45 days in an 80,000-square-foot converted facility in Ste-Basile, allowing the production to use up to 16 sets simultaneously, says Raymond. Exteriors go for 50 days through to Aug. 21.

dop Daniel Fournier is originating on Super 16mm. Mychele Boudrias is supervising producer, Andre Gagnon is composing and Gaudeline Sauriol is the art director. Odette Gadoury is the costume designer and J.P. Cereghetti is the technical editor. Special effects were designed by Erik and Karl Gosselin.

tva has licensed Juliette Pomerleau for two broadcasts over five years. Distribution Tele-Action has foreign rights and Rose Films Distribution has Canadian rights.

Investors in the $9.3-million production include the ctcpf, Telefilm Canada and sodec. The guarantor is ffc. B.F. Lorenzetti is the insurance agent and Banque National provided interim financing.

Claude Fournier’s filmography includes the Australian miniseries Golden Fiddles starring Kate Nelligan, The Mills of Power, the classic Bonheur d’Occasion (The Tin Flute), based on the Gabrielle Roy novel, and more recently, the successful box-office comedy J’en suis.

Looking ahead, Raymond has acquired rights to the Constance Beresford-Howe novel The Book of Eve, the story of a woman whose life takes a dramatic turn when she reaches age 65. The property is being developed as a feature in association with Lions Gate Films chairman Andre Link. Terry Hawks is writing the screenplay.

– New from NFB’s Culture & Experimentation

The National Film Board’s Studio Culture & Experimentation has a handful of new documentaries on tap.

Serge Giguere’s Le Passeur is a one-hour portrait of the driving personalities in traditional Quebec music, while Lucie Lachapelle’s Femmes et Religieuses is a two-part history of the remarkable women who built La Nouvelle-France and modern-day Quebec. An international festival career is being planned for another nfb production, Najwa Tlili’s Rupture.

Andre Gladu, producer for the French Programme’s Studio Culture & Experimentation, says Le Passeur is an apt expression of the studio’s mandate, namely to produce documentaries on cultural and artistic subjects, typically from a social perspective.

Shot on Super 16mm and digital video, Le Passeur examines the spirit of characters such as Gilles Garand, a csn militant and musician in the Woody Guthrie mold; Philippe Bruneau, exiled in France but considered to be one of North America’s leading accordionists; and Aldor Morin, a harmonica player and a contemporary of the late, great Ti-Jean Carignan.

Passeur is slated for delivery in May ’99.

Lachapelle’s Femmes et Religieuses is being produced by Gladu and Johanne Carrier in two parts, Femmes de Dieu (1600-1900) and Ouvrieres de Dieu (XX Siecle). The cinematographer is Prix Albert-Tessier filmmaker Jean-Claude Labrecque.

The production traces the remarkable devotion of the ‘religious adventurers’ who contributed their lives to the health, education and development of early Quebec, ‘la Jerusalem des terres froides,’ and their subsequent disinheritance at the time of the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

In Rupture, Tlili, who is originally from Tunisia, examines transcultural and human rights issues as personified by two immigrant Arab women who courageously tell their own stories of domestic abuse.

Gladu is a veteran documentary filmmaker who took on the studio assignment with the nfb some 18 months ago. The studio produces four to five films annually with tv-style budgets in the order of $300,000 to $450,000.

With funding cutbacks closing regional offices, and schools and communities often underequipped, Gladu says theatrical releases for many nfb productions are increasingly limited to festivals, and television has become the primary window.

‘The battle that we’re fighting is to convince broadcasters like Radio-Canada and Tele-Quebec, a little like Canal D, to conserve a rightful place for documentaries,’ he says. According to the producer, the public has a right to point-of-view documentaries because they stand out in a commercial, mass-media culture and are an important component in the defense of democratic values.

Julie Huguet recently joined Culture & Experimentation as its distribution agent.

– Allegro on the go

Allegro Films is steaming ahead on the sixth in a series of 12 to 14 feature film thrillers slated for ’98 and early ’99.

Robert Ditchburn’s The Press Run wraps mid-month after 20 days of shooting. Patrick Bergin (Eye of the Beholder), Annie Dufresne and Bruce Dinsmore star in an original Ron Base story about a newspaper editor unjustly accused of murdering his publisher.

Jacques Methe and Stephane Reichel are exec producing the series with a mix of partners, Saban International, Brainstorm Media, w.i.n., Legend Entertainment and Motion International.

Daniel Villeneuve is the dop on Press Run. Csaba Kertesz is the designer and Yves Langlois is editing at MultiMontage. The producer is Robert Wertheimer.

ieg has foreign rights and Legend has the u.s. The shoot is Ditchburn’s first as a director.

Taken, just wrapped under the direction of Max Fischer, stars Dabney Coleman and Linda Smith in a Pierre Lapointe mystery about a wife who refuses to help her kidnapped businessman hubby.

Bert Tougas was the dop, David Gaucher was the designer, Isabelle Levesque is editing and Renaud Mathieu produced.

Saban has foreign rights and Motion and Legend have the u.s.

Also in the can is Marc Voizard’s Running Home, a story about a goodhearted street punk in search of a mother and in deep trouble with the cops.

Vancouver actor Kristian Ayre is punk-boy Matt and Babylon 5 regular Claudia Christian plays his artsy mom. Also featured are Serge Houde (Nazareth USA), Andreas Apergis as the killer cop Hayes, and Montreal talent Jessica Dhavernas as Matt’s girlfriend Jessica.

Stephen Reizes is the dop and Donna Noonan (Little Men, Running Home) is the production designer.

Brainstorm has u.s. rights and w.i.n. has international.

The first three Allegro thrillers completed are Marc S. Grenier’s Fatal Affair, Doug Jackson’s Requiem for Murder and Rodney Gibbons’ The Pact. Methe says six to eight more are on the way.

– More film action

Upcoming production in Quebec includes Jerzy Marek Kanievska’s Where The Money Is, a comedy/suspense starring Paul Newman, and the six-hour Productions La Fete crime-family miniseries Family.

Slated to start July 27, Where The Money Is is a WTMI Production feature film from producers Ridley Scott and Deborah Lee. Scott Free, Tony and Ridley Scott’s company, was in town about a year ago to shoot The Hunger, a Showtime anthology series coventured with Telescene Film Group.

Where The Money Is will be crewed by the stcvq, with Francois Sylvestre hired as supervising producer/pm. Andre Chamberland of the Directors Guild in Quebec is the designer.

In this story, with suburban Montreal standing in for small-town usa, Newman, 73, is confined to a wheelchair in a state convalescent home facing serious criminal charges. Linda Fiorentino plays a conspiratorial nurse. Dermont Mulroney also stars. It wraps Sept. 25.

Preproduction begins later this month on The Bone Collector, a Universal Pictures feature from producer Louis Stroller (Snake Eyes) set for a mid-September start.

The rumor mill includes Productions Prisma’s Back to Sherwood Forest, a 13-part tv series coproduction with bbc and Showtime; Fish, a new Melenny Productions feature from director Jeffery Edwards; and Home Team, a Transfilm feature from producer Luciano Lisi and director Allan Goldstein.