High Road Productions has just created a new distribution division, High Road International. In addition to world market forays, the 16-year-old Toronto documentary production company is also venturing into drama.

High Road president Paul Jay says the company is switching gears, ‘and will soon have as much emphasis on drama as docs.’ Currently Jay is looking for someone to head up the new drama effort.

One development project laden with drama is Promise, a teenage girl’s survival story set in Nazi Germany. Based on Tragic Victory, the autobiography by Maria Helene Horne (nom de plume), Anna Paquin is said to be very interested in the project.

High Road has been asked to be the creative team on two Imax projects, and the company’s busy tv doc slate is also pretty dramatic.

In the wrap category, High Road’s Never-Endum Referendum 90-minute doc for Radio-Canada and Baton is currently posting, and will be ready for the company’s first trip to mip-tv as sellers next month. Having already won consensus from two broadcast partner solitudes, Jay believes that even though it’s a Canadian story the film will have universal implications and appeal: ‘You get films with such emotional issues, it touches people.’

The two versions are distinct; Anglo Blues, the French-language 60-minute version for src, shepherded through the system by Lina Allard, will air first, Sunday, April 20 at 9 p.m. on Beaux Dimanches. Broadcasts by Montreal’s CFCF-12 and Baton follow.

The $480,000 project got off the ground at the Banff Television Festival. Jay and vp tv David Ostriker talked to Michel Fortin at Radio-Canada first, who was very keen. The duo later had a meeting with Baton’s Suzanne Boyce and Suzanne Steeves, in which they were planning to pitch more commercial projects, however, the Referendum doc surfaced and Boyce and Steeves were excited by it.

It’s the first Baton/src window collaboration, and the first doc Boyce, vp of original non-dramatic programming, commissioned. Boyce is now in b.c. working on setting up civt and will be commissioning 13 docs there.

‘It seemed like a natural fit for both of us,’ Boyce says of Never-Endum, who adds she likes Jay’s work.

‘They liked the tack,’ says Jay. ‘Never-Endum deals with the human side, what politics do to people’s relationships. It’s not polemical, philosophical’

It is, in fact, humorous. It begins in a comedy club and weaves that comic thread throughout the series of vignettes that make up the body of the film.

The doc is also intercut with what Jay calls a ‘fascinating’ conversation between moderates Josh Freed and Jacques Godbout, theorizing that the media rarely gives moderates a commensurate platform.

It’s also full of music. Warren ‘Slim’ Williams is doing an original bluesy jazz track for the film which also features the musical stylings of George Bowser and Rick Blue.

Jay and Ostriker are exec producers, Jay and Sam Levene are the producers, and Jay also wrote and directed the film, produced in association with the National Film Board, with Telefilm Canada and Canada Television and Cable Production Fund support. Sally Bochner is the nfb producer. High Road vp Joan Hutton was dop.

Machine Gun and a doc on four-time wwf champ Bret ‘Hit Man’ Hart will be Ostriker’s focus at mip-tv, while on the home front he’s currently nailing down final finance pieces, and for Hart, which broadcaster to choose.

The one-hour Hart doc explores pop culture as the ‘Michelangelo of wrestling’ struggles with his part in elevating the role of the bad guy; in essence wwf’s a theater where no white hats need apply, and on a good day, bad triumphs over evil.

Sparked by Hart’s incredible international appeal (most popular wrestler on the circuit), the nfb is on board as coproducer for this project profiling a normal guy from Calgary in a bizarre world. The Bret ‘Hit Man’ Hart shoot will span Kuwait, South Africa and Germany, and is slated for an April start.

Machine Gun is three one-hours described as looking at history down the barrel of a machine gun, and Discovery Canada and Telefilm are on board.

Jay has compiled all sorts of keen machine gun nuggets, like the fact that Custer had three, but didn’t think he would need them so left them at home on the way to his last stand. Ironically, the weapon’s inventor, Dr. Gatling, thought it would end war, says Jay. Budgeted at $1.2 million, there’s also a one-hour version planned. Gun heads into production after ‘Hit Man’.

And in the twilight zone between history and entertainment is Timeframe, a 26-episode half-hour series described as Nightline meets You Are There. It’s premised on the discovery of a new satellite technology that lets a news team go any place or time to interview sources ranging from Attila the Hun to Lincoln to film the nightly news. Historical drama is covered in modern newsroom parlance in this high-concept series being developed by High Road, with the potential to do country-specific shows for copro partners, or format sales also in mind.

Among the projects currently keeping the company’s genteel new digs hopping under the watchful eyes of Lucy, is the always controversial Face Off series. On a (controversially lighter) current affairs note, Hutton helmed the amiable dop job of shooting The Newsroom, and is currently shooting a sleep disorders doc, Half Asleep, Half Alive (involving a very cool little infra red camera, worthy of q), which High Road is producing for Barna-Alper Productions for Discovery’s Body Alive series. High Road also has a commercial production arm.