Montreal: Now in its 25th year, international documentary producer InformAction has a wide slate of productions on the go, including In Search of Tarzan, Rwanda-Burundi: The Roots of Hope and Mystere B, a portrait of little-known Quebec surrealist painter Marcel Baril.

Marc Renaud’s The Roots of Hope, a one-hour doc for TV5, follows the struggle of people working to counter ethnic extremism in Burundi, a nation on the edge of chaos and again in the news.

Renaud and dop Patrice Massenet returned from Burundi July 10 following the outbreak of new massacres, says InformAction president Nathalie Barton, who’s producing with Vues d’Afrique topper Gerard Le Chene.

Barton says the film is a follow-up to last year’s Sun in the Night, a series of 30 90-second ‘human rights clips’ on people who risked their lives to help others during the ’94 carnage in Rwanda. The clips were broadcast daily earlier this year across the international TV5 network.

Barton says she was tremendously relieved when the crew returned to Montreal. ‘They did go in just after the Red Cross people got shot and we obviously worried, but we took an unanimous decision not to put it offbecause we think the situation could get worse.’

Oxfam Quebec and Centre Canadien d’etude et de cooperation Internationale have also provided funding.

Alain d’Aix’s one-hour documentary In Search of Tarzan is meant to entertain, and uses film, tv, comic book and novel archives to explore the worldwide Tarzan myth.

Through testimonials, analysis and historic visuals, the production traces the evolution of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ articulate, multilingual Ape Man to his reincarnation as the suburban family man of the Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan movies and the more recent muscular seducer of jungle beauties.

Visuals includes clips and trailers from the 1930s and ’40s and snippets from films starring Denny Miller (1959), Ron Ely (1960s) and Christopher Lambert (1984).

The film has been presold to Canal D, Television Quatre Saisons, tvontario, cfcf-tv and Knowledge Network. Mediamax International is the exporter.

Projects in development at InformAction include two Carlos Ferrand films, Visionaires (Radio-Canada) and L’Ailleurs est ici; a doc on Haiti from director d’Aix called Quand les sans voix se font entendre; Renee Cote’s Maryvonne Kendergi, a portrait of ‘the grandmother of contemporary music;’ and Jean-Daniel Lafond’s Fidel Castro’s Last Cigar.

Lafond’s Haiti in All Our Dreams won best political film at this year’s Hot Docs and recently received a slew of invitations from European film festivals.

On the key issue of funding for documentaries, Barton says, ‘Funding continues to be extremely difficult, although the specialty channels have created a bit of an opening. There is still too little primetime documentary in Quebec. In Canada, in English, the situation is perhaps a little better. But in Quebec, Radio-Canada and Radio-Quebec just don’t have enough, especially Radio-Canada.

‘We are most critical of Radio-Canada. Radio-Canada does not have a documentary policy yetand they don’t have a documentary showcase as cbc does (Witness). This is something we are asking for. We hope it’s going to open up because there are people at Radio-Canada who do support documentaries,’ says Barton, who represents the documentary sector on the apftq board.

Cuts at Telefilm Canada and sodec have hurt all right, but have been somewhat offset by the Cable Production Fund, says Barton, adding:

‘There’s a tremendous international demand for point-of-view and in-depth documentaries now, and Canada and Quebec could miss the boat if we don’t support the independent documentary production industry.’

Verseau’s child misunderstood

Shooting is slated to go for 20 days from Aug. 5-30 on L’Incompris, a new Pierre Gang (Le Sous-sol) telefilm from Verseau International.

Twinned with a second tv movie from France’s Septembre Productions, L’Incompris is being shot on Super 16mm film on location in suburban Chambly and stars Jerome Leclerc-Couture and Alexis Delvecchio as Laurent and Olivier, nine- and five-year-old brothers faced with the recent loss of their mom.

Deeply emerged in his professional life, the boys’ French father consciously or otherwise feels a closeness to the youngest child, who reminds him of his deceased wife. In contrast, he shows little understanding of the turbulent Laurent until tragedy strikes again and Laurent himself suffers a terrible accident.

Christian Fournier (Bungalow Blues, Chop Suey) wrote the screenplay in association with Daniele Bussy and Michel Langlois, the new artistic director at inis, Quebec’s advanced film studies school.

Sylvie Trudelle is the shoot’s delegate producer. Claudette Viau is the executive producer.

Selected credits go to dop Thomas Vamos, casting agency Films de la Pleine Lune, art director Louise-Marie Beauchamp, costume designer Hughette Gagne, sound recordist Serge Beauchemin, music composer Francois Dompierre and editor Florence Mouraux.

Daniel Arie’s Telepoint is handling picture and audio post and editing.

L’Incompris is budgeted at just under $1.2 million, with funding from Radio-Quebec, Super Ecran, the Cable Production Fund, Telefilm Canada and both tax credits.

Verseau president Aimee Danis says the house has been unable to develop a dramatic miniseries based on the Order of the Solar Temple murder/suicides, but will produce an extended documentary series on the chilling New Age cult and the even more disturbing police investigation.

Summer production notes

Roger Heroux of PRH Productions is prepping two telefilms in the coproduced Madame Le Consul tv movie series. The first, L’Ete des Indiens, will be directed by Bernard Van Effenterre, while the second, Le Bucher des Innocentes, is slated to start principal photography Sept. 9. prh’s main series this summer is Poils de Carotte, a coproduced animation series.

– Telescene Communications president Robin Spry, producer on the Jack Higgins mow collection, has hired popular director George Mihalka. Four films are planned, with shooting on location in Quebec scheduled from Aug. 26 to late February ’97.

Spry is also producing The Hunger, an ambitious tv horror anthology coventured with Free Scott, Tony and Ridley Scott’s production company. It’s slated to shoot at the end of September.

– Tele-Action producer Claudio Luca, coproducer on the critically acclaimed miniseries The Boys of St. Vincent, is prepping a new miniseries, Les Enfants de Duplessis. Yet another dark tale of institutional and religious order abuse of orphaned children, Luca has hired Johanne Pregent to direct. The startup date is early September.

– Two big-nugget stcvq-prepped features – Richard Friedberg’s The Education of Little Tree and Michael Caton-Jones’ The Jackal, the official film adaptation of the best-selling novel The Day of the Jackal – have had their start moved back to later in August.