Fireworks will launch production on 13 one-hour episodes of La Femme Nikita in Toronto on Oct. 7. The series, which is being produced for ctv and USA Network, will star Australian Peta Wilson as Nikita, Roy Dupuis as Michael and Alberta Watson as Madelaine. Jaime Paul Rock is producing and production is expected to stretch into March.

Loosely based on the original feature film, the series follows the exploits of a woman trained by a government agency to be a hitman after she’s wrongly accused of cold-blooded murder.

Holy Hollywood, Batman!

After all is said and done, there were some disappointed people in our nation’s capital when Warner Bros. announced it won’t be shooting parts of Batman & Robin in Ottawa after all.

Producer Peter Macgregor-Scott says the complexity of the special effects and the technical demands of the film require shooting on a soundstage rather than on location. ‘We will have to create a little movie magic in a studio,’ says Macgregor-Scott.

Mira and Miramax

Miramax will be in Toronto mid-September shooting Mimic, a feature starring Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino, Jeremy Northram, Charles Dutton and Josh Brolin.

The shoot, which is expected to run into December, will be on location in the subway system as well as in studio, where sources say there will be a fairly extensive build. No decision yet as to where the effects-heavy flick will post, but producer B.J. Rack says Toronto is a possibility. Guillermo Del Toro is on board as director and Scott Shiffman is line producing.

So close, and yet so far

Toronto’s Christene Browne is a filmmaker stuck in a place familiar to many of her peers – between a rock and a hard place.

This summer she spent three weeks shooting Another Planet, the first feature film from her company Syncopated Productions. The film – a story about a young girl whose search for her African identity finds her on a Quebec pig farm – was shot for under $300,000 with a crew of underpaid keys and volunteers, and by cutting some sweet deals with suppliers like Kodak. Now that the footage is in the can, Browne says she needs ‘at least $200,000’ for post.

It’s not a new story, not by a long shot, but what bugs Browne about the whole thing is the treatment she’s received from Telefilm Canada. She presented her script to the agency last year, making sure to emphasize that it was a distinctly Canadian Black story with universal appeal, but a project officer refused to look at the script because there wasn’t an experienced producer attached.

After it was shot she was refused a look-in – even when she says officials were ‘openly impressed’ with the footage – because there was no distributor attached, leaving her with a final quandary. Distributors, particularly Alliance, have expressed an interest, but they want to see a rough cut, not to mention some Telefilm commitment.

‘I found the attitude very discouraging,’ says Browne. ‘There was much more emphasis on what I didn’t have than on what I did.’

She’s also quick to point out that the risk for potential investors in such a small-budget project is pretty low, and that the insistence on a theatrical distribution deal seems irrelevant when conventional wisdom says Canadian feature films make most of their money (when they make money) in the foreign and ancillary markets.

Browne, a native of Toronto’s Regent Park and a documentary filmmaker for the last seven years, hopes to enlist fellow filmmakers in a campaign to raise awareness in the Canadian media of Canadian film, but first she’d like to get her own project done. She’s in discussions with a number of community groups to organize a fundraising event for this fall.

Life after TIFF

While the shine has barely worn off the excitement of having their works selected, Ontario filmmakers featured in the Perspective Canada program at the Toronto International Film Festival are hardly resting on their laurels.

Colleen Murphy, whose first feature The Shoemaker is included in the program, is in the middle of writing a play for stage director Richard Rose called Die Lahmung (The Paralysis) as well as writing Desire, her next feature.

Desire, a dark story about a lounge pianist who’s suspected of being a child murderer, will be produced by Elizabeth Yake, the producer behind The Shoemaker.

‘It goes back to darker themes, more like my short films,’ says Murphy.

Murphy is definitely looking for a theatrical release for Desire, which she hopes to shoot next year. The Shoemaker, distributed by Andre Bennett’s Cinema Esperanca, is expected to be released in February.

In the weeks leading up to the fest, Colin Strayer will be putting the finishing touches on his Perspective Canada film Rod Serling: Writer. He says the 60 days or so leading up to the festival are generally ‘like Christmas’ for local labs.

His gig as production supervisor on the aforementioned Batman shoot in Ottawa was cut short, but after the festival he’ll be going back to a feature doc called American Diner, a project he was working on before ‘Rod Serling took over my life.’ American Diner tracks the rise and fall of that American icon, the roadside eatery.

As for Rod Serling: Writer, it will be broadcast on A&E sometime this fall.

Michael McNamara has just finished working on tvontario’s Polka Dot Shorts. ‘It helped pay for the cockroach,’ he says. His first feature, The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati, is a far cry from the children’s work and music projects on which he’s built his name. The film, which is based on a trilogy by screenwriter Alan Williams, features Williams expelling borderline psychotic ramblings on location in and around Windsor and Detroit. Polkaroo, it ain’t.

McNamara will be on the hunt for a distributor during the festival. His preference for Cockroach – a self-financed picture born from a windfall of a couple of buckets of unexposed film – would be a limited theatrical release, but he thinks the project would play very well on the little screen.

After the Toronto hullabaloo is over, McNamara will be heading to Sudbury’s Cinefest, where he thinks he might actually get to see a few films, and the Vancouver International Film Festival. Beyond that, he’s trying to get the rights to ‘a famous American crime novel’ in hopes of carving a niche for himself in detective movies. And a note to producers: he’d love to do some episodic tv work.