• Rogers Media is buying the Outdoor Life Network from its partners CTVglobemedia and Versus, taking the one-third share owned by each in the sporty cable channel. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008, according to a statement issued by the Toronto media conglom, and is subject to CRTC approval. Financial details of the separate agreements with CTVgm and Versus, a U.S.-based cable and satellite sportscaster, were not revealed.

You probably haven’t heard – there’s been so little written, posted, aired, blogged and Facebook’ed about it – but the writers are on strike down in the U.S. And after some three weeks, the fallout has quickly spread beyond the picket lines in L.A., with shoots in B.C., including The Bionic Woman and Men in Trees, shutting down for lack of scripts. So we ask:

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Emma De Caunes, Diane Kruger, Rosalie Julien and Caroline Néron star in Denys Arcand’s L’âge des ténèbres (Days of Darkness), which opens in Quebec on Dec. 7. The highly anticipated follow-up to Arcand’s Oscar-winning Les Invasions barbares also stars Marc Labrèche, as a man who fantasizes to escape his mundane life. Although the film received mixed reviews at Cannes and Toronto, it is Canada’s selection for best foreign-language film at this year’s Academy Awards.

It has been a year of unprecedented volatility in the Canadian film and TV industries, but that didn’t stop top producers from notching some significant accomplishments.

Among the incriminating evidence the Federal Bureau of Investigation has on Gary Howsam is surveillance footage of the former Peace Arch Entertainment CEO with a knife in his hand.

Gerry Flahive is an award-winning documentary producer at the National Film Board in Toronto, with credits including Manufactured Landscapes and Just Watch Me: Trudeau and the 70’s Generation.

New Zealand writer/director Virginia Heath walked away from the Sheffield International Documentary Festival with $10,500 and a copro deal with the National Film Board for My Dangerous Loverboy. The interactive project – which combines web and mobile sites to raise awareness about the global sex trade – won the NFB’s Cross-Media Challenge at the close of the annual doc fest on Nov. 11.

MONTREAL: Following its hit action flick Nitro and its wildly popular family drama C.R.A.Z.Y., Cirrus Communications is bringing an auteur story of social unrest to the big screen in 2008. The $5.4-million Comme une flamme is inspired by the massive student strike that shut down Quebec’s colleges and universities for two months in 2005 and forced Premier Jean Charest to back down from his plans to cut the province’s bursary program.

Embattled Peace Arch Entertainment has put a $15-million movie, The Boathouse, on hold after being swamped by the dramatic arrest of CEO Gary Howsam earlier this month. British producer Studio Eight Productions was set to lens the psychological thriller beginning mid-November in Barrie, ON. A local lakeside cottage was prepped for the film, which is based on a script by Vancouver-based screenwriter Elizabeth Stewart.

Seven24 Films has linked with Kudos Film and Television in the U.K. on the $15-million miniseries Burn Up, now in the works around Calgary for Global and the BBC. The four-hour enviro-minded thriller sees director Omar Madha team with Bradley Whitford (The West Wing), Neve Campbell (Scream) and Brit Rupert Penry-Jones, star of the long-running Kudos series Spooks, known here as MI-5. Christopher Hall (Hound of the Baskervilles) is producing the project, which shoots in Alberta until mid-December, after which it will wrap with a week of shooting in London in the new year. It is set to air in the spring.

A Canada/U.K. coproduction, reported to be the biggest-budget feature in the history of the New Brunswick film industry, has gone down. Bonny Boys, produced by Tim Hogan of Moncton-based Dream Street Pictures (Canada Russia ’72) and U.K. producers Robert Sidaway and Ashley Sidaway (Joy Division, Nouvelle-France), shut down at the end of October, reportedly due to scheduling conflicts. Rachel Blanchard (Where the Truth Lies), originally slated for the lead role, is no longer associated with the project.