Advertising executive-turned-writer/director Bill Keenan has lured the seasoned acting chops of The Newsroom’s Peter Keleghan and Leah Pinsent and Little Mosque on the Prairie’s Neil Crone to his first feature film production, Eating Buccaneers.

When producer André Rouleau read the script for Magique, a France/Canada copro about a melancholic rural family that gets a surprise visit from a traveling circus, he knew it would be a very original film.

Following his roving-reporter stint on Canadian Idol, Ottawa-born comedian Jon Dore is working double duty as host and creator on a new skit, comedy and interview series for The Comedy Network, The Jon Dore Show. Inspired by the likes of Late Night with Conan O’Brien and featuring Toronto-based sketch comedy acts such as Knock Knock, Who’s There? Comedy!, the half-hour series will bow on the cable channel on Oct. 18 for a 13-episode run.

Peace Point Entertainment has gone to camera on a new show, and is shooting a two-season 26 x 30 run of Fresh with Anna Olson until November for Food Network Canada. The pastry chef-turned-broadcaster has opened her turn-of-the-century country home, in the Niagara region of Ontario, to the show, which has her preparing fresh and local food for special occasions.

The Vancouver International Film Festival doesn’t have the Hollywood stars like Toronto or the business deals of Cannes, but it has carved out its own unique presence on the film fest circuit.

The lineup of Canuck films on the fall festival circuit is chock-full of terrific comedies and intense literary adaptations, led by Kari Skogland’s The Stone Angel, the ideal opener for the Canadian Images program.

VIFF is poised to reassert its foothold in nonfiction programming with 84 documentary features – including 40 premieres – aiming to satisfy Vancouver’s insatiable appetite for truth.

B.C.’s nonfiction filmmakers are center stage at VIFF with five world premieres about radically different subjects.

In 2002, Canadian Yung Chang went on one of the so-called ‘farewell cruises’ along the Yangtze River with his parents and grandfather. It was a common trip for tourists to see the area before it was to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam, and the voyage became the catalyst for the feature doc Up the Yangtze.

Films from China are spotlighted in this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, with epic Chinese filmmaking represented by Jiang Wen’s The Sun Also Rises, an operatic tale of love and madness set in the 1970s, starring Joan Chen.

The Vancouver International Digital Festival, four days of digital media events focusing on animation, gaming, web 2.0, mobile and interactive content, begins Sept. 22, in essence kicking off the city’s major film festival.

The environment plays a starring role in this year’s VIFF through the fest’s new Climate for Change series.