Montreal: Academy Award-winning actor Jodie Foster is the exec producer on Waking the Dead, a dramatic love story filming on location here over nine weeks through to April 5.

The production is from Los Angeles-based Egg Pictures, with financing, us$10 million, from PolyGram Filmed Entertainment.

The screenplay was adapted by director Keith Gordon from the Scott Spencer novel and is Gordon’s second Montreal date, after Mother Night, and the third for producer Linda Reisman following Paul Schrader’s Affliction shot here last spring. Reisman (The Comfort of Strangers), Gordon and Stuart Kleinman, Foster’s partner and president of Egg, are producing.

Waking the Dead is the first noteworthy location shoot for Montreal this year when direct location spending by u.s. producers is expected to match or surpass the $130 million spent in ’97, up from $86.5 million two years ago. American producers invested another $51 million last year via coventures with Canadian partners, according to the Montreal Film and TV Commission.

Waking the Dead is the story of a Kennedyesque Congressional candidate played by Billy Crudup (Inventing the Abbotts, Without Limits) who begins to question his sanity when he has visions of a former lover killed 10 years earlier in a terrorist bombing.

Stars include Jennifer Connelly (Mulholland Falls), Janet McTeer, Paul Hipp, multi-Emmy winner Hal Holbrook and Genie Award winner Molly Parker (Twitch City, Kissed).

The film has 53 speaking parts and is staged over 12 years in 1970s and ’80s New York, Chicago and Washington, d.c. Over 70 locations are being used.

Kleinman, a former entertainment and securities lawyer with icm, says Montreal was chosen for the diversity of its locations and highly motivated technicians and designers from the stcvq and the Directors Guild of Canada.

‘I’ve been talking to the PolyGram people and telling them this is an amazing place to shoot,’ he says. ‘They should be doing much more production here. PolyGram is more of a studio than it ever was, and in a sense, this (production) is being funded like a studio film.’

And while the Canadian and upcoming Quebec production service rebate programs ‘are a tremendous incentive,’ Kleinman says production value is the bigger issue. ‘We bought our Canadian dollars a long time ago,’ he says.

Waking’s pm and coproducer is Irene Litinsky. Patrick Rousseau is the sound recordist and Tom Richmond is the dop. Montrealer Zoe Sakellaropoulo (The Sleep Room) is production designer and Renee April (Black Robe) is the costume designer.

Gramercy Pictures, a PolyGram-owned company, will distribute in the u.s. PolyGram Film International has worldwide rights.

Established in 1992, Egg also produced Nell and Home for the Holidays. A francophile and fluent in French, Foster was instrumental in the u.s. release (via Gramercy) of Mathieu Kassovitz’s critically acclaimed La Haine.

Kleinman recently wrapped Baby Dance in Vancouver, a tv movie produced in association with Pacific Motion Pictures, Hallmark and Showtime.

‘The kind of projects we like to do are smart, risky, but also intelligent and hopefully commercial,’ says Kleinman.

Foster was in town earlier, supervising preproduction, apparently one of her specialties. AstralTech is handling rushes. Local casting is by Lucie Robitaille.

– TPI’s new horizons

Taqramiut Productions, headquartered in Kuujjuaq in Northern Quebec (Nunavik), is moving beyond its weekly tvnc assignments to produce two primetime tv projects, Tundra & Taiga, a 13 one-hour adventure-style doc series, and Northern Tales, a four-hour docudrama miniseries.

Each episode of Tundra & Taiga explores a unique theme, with commentary from writers and journalists who travel to communities in the Inuit, Cree and Naskapis territories. The project is being produced in French, English and Inuttituk, with funding from Telefilm Canada’s Aboriginal envelope. Exporter Mediamax International has also expressed interest, says series and tpi exec producer Michela Alibrando.

‘Once we get the two pilots completed [this month], we’re looking for a broadcaster. That’s where we’re at,’ says Alibrando.

tpi is also developing a four-hour docudrama called Northern Tales. The first installment, ‘Love on Hudson Strait,’ is the story of a British woman who leaves her comfortable European past to live in the North where she falls in love and has a child.

Working out of a production office in Dorval, Que., tpi was set up in October 1996 and is a subsidiary of Taqramiut Nipingat, the non-profit radio and tv society of the Inuit of Northern Quebec.

tpi produces 14 hours of radio and two hours of tv weekly, broadcast across Northern Canada on tvnc.

– Paris splash for Liste Noire

Jean Marc Vallee’s Liste Noire thriller is booked to open April 15 on 30 screens in greater Paris, one of the most ambitious releases ever for a Quebec movie in France.

The film tells the story of a high-priced hooker, played by talented Genevieve Brouillette, who stages her own arrest to further a blackmail scheme, triggering murderous intent on the part of her distinguished and double-dealing cop, lawyer, judge and politician clients.

According to Jean Bureau of exporter Motion International, French distrib Mendy Younes of Caro Line Distribution plans a high-profile Paris premiere, with Brouillette, Vallee and GPA Films producer Marcel Giroux attending.

Bureau says federal and provincial export programs, specifically the theatrical codistribution agreement signed last November by France’s cnc and Quebec’s sodec, helped paved the way for the sale to France.

– Docs at Multi-Monde

Productions Multi-Monde producer Malcolm Guy’s latest doc is When Strangers Reunite, a one-hour profile of foreign domestic workers in Canada and their hopes for reunification with family left behind. Marie Boti and Florchita Bautista are codirecting. Funding is from Vision tv, scn and wtn. Germaine Wong of the National Film Board in Montreal is the coproducer.

Guy (Moving the Mountain) and Lucie Pageau are also developing a feature film, Le Parfum du ciel, from filmmaker Leonce Ngabo. This film tells a coming-of-age story of a young Burundi woman forced to leave a countryside village ripped by tribal violence and move to the city.

Guy says the film will be funded either as a tripartite coproduction with France and Burkina Faso, or directly with South Africa. Vues d’Afrique, the African coproduction program, is funding.

Recent production at Multi-Monde includes an animation short called Stray Dog from director Farzin Farzaneh and producer Michelle Smith based on a story of free will and fate from Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat; and Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves, a doc cowritten by Boti and Smith. The starkly disturbing portrayal of migrant laborers in Singapore is partly based on the case of Flor Contemplacion, the Filipino maid hanged amidst worldwide protest. It was sold to cbc’s Witness.