Montreal: Quebec’s cultural funding and certification agency, sodec, is preparing its maiden voyage to one of Europe’s leading short film venues, Festival du court metrage de Clermont-Ferrand, Jan. 31 to Feb. 8.

Project director Nathalie Clermont says public agencies from countries throughout Europe attend the festival and market, scouting out product and the filmmakers of tomorrow. Last year, some 1,300 professionals attended the event.

sodec is sponsoring a Horizon Quebec stand at the market, with some 10 typically younger local filmmakers planning to attend.

Among those making the trip to France are sodec international affairs delegate Christian Verbert, responsible for the agency’s marketing; Cinema Libre president Claude Forget, a specialist in short film distribution; gpa producer Marcel Goroux (Liste Noire); and Francois Pouliot, a short film/videoclip producer with Loco-Motion.

Quebec’s presence at Clermont-Ferrand is its bigger ever, says Clermont.

Hugo Brochu’s Anna a la lettre c, a Films de l’autre short about an unusual torrid summer-day meeting of a young woman and a not-so-young male, is entered in the festival’s official competition.

Feb. 4 is Quebec Day at the festival, with some half dozen films on the program, including Nadine Schwartz’s Liquid Love, Pierre Sylvestre’s Epaves, Diane Gagnon’s Pour une nuit, Lorenzo Negri’s Tempo, Sylvain Guy’s feature debut, Zie 37 Stagen, a symbolic surreal elevator ride between heaven and hell, and Alain Desrochers’ L’Oreille de Joe.

The majority of the films were financed by sodec’s Programme d’aide aux jeunes createurs.

-Rainmakers update

Adobe Foundations producers Robbie Hart and Luc Cote are editing their latest tv doc series Rainmakers, a six-part examination of youth leaders from around the world.

Shot on video over eight months last year on location in India, Thailand, the u.s., Canada, Romania and Peru, Rainmakers airs on cbc later this spring as a Man Alive special, and over six consecutive evenings in late ’97 on Tele-Quebec. cbc is committed to a second broadcast prior to a run on CBC Newsworld. Vision tv and scn are licensed for subsequent windows.

Hart describes the series as a dramatic up-front look at six 20-something activists, all of whom have gone through terrible times yet emerged as remarkable community leaders.

The Canadian segment, taped in Winnipeg and Le Pas, Man., is the story of Rena, a Native leader and mother of two who wages an impassioned fight on behalf of her people despite a lifelong battle with arthritis, alcohol and abuse.

Recent Adobe projects include the eight-part series Turning 16, sold to ytv and Tele-Quebec in Canada and some 35 broadcasters internationally, and When the Circus Comes to Town, a one-hour doc on the Cirque du Soleil’s courageous work with ultra-alienated street kids in Rio de Janeiro and Montreal.

Rainmakers was shot for $972,000 with the financial participation of Telefilm Canada, the Cable Production Fund, exporter The Multimedia Group of Canada and the Canadian International Development Agency.

-Picture This

One of the more promising young documentary outfits on the Montreal scene is Picture This Productions, recently launched by producer/directors David Finch, a field producer for cfcf-tv’s BuzZone, a ’96 CanPro winner, and Maureen Marovitch, a senior producer with cbc’s Busy Bodies.

The house’s maiden production is Backroads, a 45-minute doc that charts the story of Harmony and Adam Hubert, a brother and sister who set out on an emotional cross-country hitchhiking journey in search of a mother who left them 16 years ago.

Essentially a road movie with a healthy dose of family drama, the film’s second act unfolds when the kids meet up with their actual mom, a person far removed from the fantasy version the children had cultivated over many miles and years.

Saul Pincus was the shoot’s Sony Hi-8 cameraman. Jason Levy edited. Backroads was produced in association with CBC Newsworld and Rogers Documentary Fund on a budget of $90,000. Finch says talks are underway with pbs for a u.s. sale. It premiers on CBC Newsworld’s Rough Cuts Feb. 3.

Picture This projects in development include The Wedding Band, a ‘tongue-in-cheek look at the state of marriage in North America,’ and Hellman’s Scrapbook, a feature film based on the Robert Majzels novel of the same name. Finch is also looking for a coproducer for a ‘quasi-sitcom/drama’ called Headshots.

-Wild Heart’s Deported

Montreal’s Wild Heart Productions is among the city’s most dynamic younger houses. The company specializes in tv documentaries and has several exciting projects in development.

Producers Catherine Bainbridge, ex of cbmt-tv’s CityBeat, and Katerina Cizek are looking for financing for The Deported, an unprecedented doc examination of the fate of some of the 5,000 refugees to Canada who are deported each year.

Bainbridge (Power of the North, Okanada) says ngo and refugee lawyers have told them, ‘We have no idea what happens to these people.’ So the idea is to travel, hopefully sometime this summer, to places likes Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Somalia and find out first-hand.

Producer Ina Fichman and Maximage Productions and Wild Heart are also developing an extended tv project called Absolute tv, a series of hard-hitting, five- to seven-minute mini-reports from some of the country’s leading documentarians, including Peter Wintonick, who’s slated to host the program, Peter Raymont, Linda Lee Tracy and Ric Esther Bienstock, director of Ms. Conceptions, the ’96 Gemini doc winner.

Bainbridge says she was thrilled with their unexpected Gemini nomination (best writing in a doc program or series – Katerina Cizek, Els De Temmerman, Anna Van der Wee) for Van der Wee’s The Dead are Alive: Eyewitness in Rwanda, an account of war correspondent De Temmerman’s surreal journey through the horrific events of ’94.

cfcf-tv, whose programming vp Bill Merrill supports lots of worthy and under-budgeted documentary projects out of Montreal, Radio-Quebec (now Tele-Quebec) and tvontario broadcast the film in Canada with foreign sales to Europe, Japan and Asia by George Matta’s Mundovision and var of Belgium.

Last month, the film was honored at the first European Community Humanitarian Office Awards in Ireland and took home a Golden Gate award at the San Francisco International Film & Video Festival.

Wild Heart has an active office in Belgium headed by Van der Wee.

-New film projects

‘By February, we’ll have a dozen films in production and preproduction. Normally this is the kind of thing we see in June,’ says Pierre Lafrance, director with the stcvq, Quebec’s freelance film technicians union.

The pre-spring lineup includes the Tormenta Productions (Largo) feature Affliction from director Paul Schrader; Le Dernier des Beauchesne, a Vision 4 sequel to Matusalem, Roger Cantin’s ‘millionaire’ box office family fantasy; The Sleep Room, a historical Zukerman/Cinar miniseries from director Anne Wheeler; and The Red Violin, a new Rhombus Media project with director Francois Girard, the same partners who produced the multiple Genie-winning (including best motion picture) Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

Projects headed for preproduction next month include two new Jack Higgins cable movies from Telescene Film Group – Number of the Beast and Touch the Devil – apparently contingent on talks at natpe; Adam and Smoke, a new Allegro Films feature from producer Tom Berry; two Kingsborough Greenlight features – Nico the Unicorn from director Graeme Campbell and Owd Bob from busy director/dop Rodney Gibbons – with shooting planned for Quebec, Alberta and the Isle of Man. Gibbons is also slated to direct Asylum, a new Blackwatch Communications feature thriller from producer Bill Mariani.

Prepping is also set to begin soon on the second season of the Cinar Films series Lassie. Irene Litinsky is the producer.