Point de Mire documentary

series tracks status of women

Montreal: Financing on the six-hour Productions Point de Mire international documentary series, Women, This Wave an Ocean, has been secured with timely presales to the CTV Television Network, Radio-Canada and TV5.

Producer Raymond Gauthier says talks are underway with u.s. actress Susan Sarandon (Thelma and Louise, Bull Durham) to host the series about the emancipation of women over the ages.

Scripted by Point de Mire president Lise Payette and former National Film Board executive producer Rina Fraticelli, the series is being directed by Lea Pool (Mouvements du desir, Montreal vu par), Paule Baillargeon (Le Sex des Etoiles, Sonia) and Anne Henderson (The Human Race, A Song for Tibet).

Budgeted at $3.2 million, the 16mm shoot goes from April to June on location on five continents, says line producer Mary Armstrong.

The series is billed as a ‘definitive portrait of the status of women around the world as we prepare to enter the 21st century. (It) will celebrate women who have beaten the system over the centuries in many ingenious ways.’

Point de Mire is also in production on 44 one-hour episodes of a new Lise Payette teleroman, Les Machos, seen on the TVA Television Network, and recently acquired the rights from Productions Cleo-Clip to the seventh season of the popular Sylvie Payette-penned teleroman, Chambres en Ville.

In November, Lise Payette was recognized for her outstanding 40-year career on behalf of women by being named 1994 Canadian Woman of the Year by Canadian Women in Communications. The award was presented to Payette in Winnipeg by crtc chairman Keith Spicer at the cwc’s fourth annual conference.

Number 11 in series

Aska Films producer Claude Gagnon and director Andre Melancon are shooting the latest mow entry in the popular French tv series L’Instit.

In Le Boulard, the 11th film in the series, the central character, a traveling prof played by French actor Gerard Klein, sojourns to Quebec on a cultural exchange. Each film has its own social spin, and in this case, it’s the plight of street people and the homeless.

Coproduced with France’s Hamster, Aska owns 100% of Le Boulard, part of a smart financing package which will see the Canadian company take a minority 20% share in four more L’Instit films. The 22-day shoot goes from Feb. 11 to March 14. Broadcasters are France 3, Super Ecran and Radio-Quebec.

Gagnon, who is producing with partner Yuri Yoshimura-Gagnon, says the creative freedom on the shoot is a big draw for director Melancon, who worked on the dialogue with writer Annie Pierard.

Gagnon traveled to Paris last week for TF-1’s prescreening of Pour l’amour de Thomas (previously L’Ile Verte), shot in Quebec last summer and coproduced with GMT Productions, the tv arm of French distributor ugc.

‘It’s better to coproduce than to just rely on public funds,’ says Gagnon. ‘The world is opening up. The idea that any of us live in some perfectly homogenous place is completely depasse.’

By late spring or early summer, Gagnon plans to produce Gilles Carle’s Pudding Chomeur, the director’s first feature in nearly three and a half years.

Trinome branches out

With the accent on focus groups and program research, the people at Trinome-Inter are building a real future for the eight-year-old company.

Trinome president Pierre Blais and vice-president, r&d Jean Tourangeau attended their first natpe last month, and Tourangeau says the company is moving beyond kids’ shows and infotainment to family entertainment and tv series.

Trinome has more than $5 million in production on tap in 1995. Shows include the third season of Shlak, last year’s Prix Gemeaux-winner for best original game show, broadcast on Canal Famille and tvontario’s La Chaine francaise; a $350,000 16mm Cinema Centenary anthology series of 52 four-minute capsules on Quebec filmmakers, actors and craftspeople to be directed by Blais, a longtime director with Radio-Canada, and broadcast on TV5 and Television Quatre Saisons, and as a one-hour special on Canal D; and a just-confirmed but as yet unidentified series for Tele-Metropole. Sponsors for the film anthology include Kodak Canada and Locations Michel Trudel.

The best news from Trinome, says Tourangeau, is a green light for Pignon sur rue, Quebec’s first reality-based tv show.

Director Guy Bouchard will cast seven young adults – all non-actors aged 18 to 25 – who live outside the metropolitan region. They’ll be shipped to the big city, housed, and for 10 months beginning in July, the highs and lows of their radically altered collective existence will be recorded on videotape. A Quebecois version of the mtv show The Real World, but different, Tourangeau says 37 half-hours of Pignon sur rue are planned. Broadcasters include Radio-Quebec and La Chaine.

Projects in development include Gabi, an animated series to be coproduced with France under the supervision of veteran creative director Don Arioli, and a tv adventure series from writers Dominique Drouin and Bertrand Montas called Bush Pilot. Telefilm Canada has invested in the development of this series.

In transit

This month’s Berlin Film Festival (Feb. 9-20) is the 16th consecutive for exporter/packager Films Transit and president Jan Rofekamp. The Dutch-born Rofekamp and partner Catherine Le Clef have an official entry in hand for 1995, Alain Robbie-Grillet’s and Dimitri deClerq’s Un bruit qui rend fou, shot in Cinemascope and starring Arielle Dombaste and Fred Ward (The Player).

Other Films Transit entries in Berlin are Chilean director Gonzalo Justiniano’s Amnesia, picked up by Rofekamp at the 1994 Montreal World Film Festival, Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, Deborah Hoffman’s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter and the late Marlon Riggs’ Black Is.

The company kicked off the new year in style, screening three u.s. indie-produced films at the Sundance Film Festival – Michel Negroponte’s Jupiter’s Wife, Black Is and Crumb, a 110-minute portrait of the legendary American comic book artist who recently moved to Southern France. The latter, presented by David Lynch, won the festival’s top documentary prize and best cinematography award.

Unable to sustain a viable export operation with only Canadian films, Rofekamp says he won’t complain about been pushed into buying international titles. Pushed, he says, because the bigger Canadian distributors – with exclusive access to Telefilm Canada’s $14 million Feature Film Distribution Fund – monopolize Canadian feature film export rights. He says Canadian producers are almost always forced to deal foreign when they line up for a domestic distributor.