Toronto ­- OMNI Television has teamed with producers on opposite sides of the Pacific to produce Once Upon a Time in Toronto, a 20 x 60 drama about immigrant families billed as a copro between Canada and China. Production on the Mandarian-language project is set to start in Toronto in February. Produced by local prodco Goldspin and Western Movie Group of China, with funding from OMNI’s Independent Producers Initiative, the series follows the lives of Chinese immigrant families living in Toronto and will air here and in China.

Goldberg takes on Short subject

Vancouver – Insight Film Studios is in preproduction on While She Was Out, a thriller starring Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile) as a suburban housewife who becomes stranded in a forest full of murderous thugs. Shooting begins in Vancouver on Feb. 5 with a wrap date of March 16.

Vancouver – A thriller starring Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada) is the latest production to go to camera at Vancouver’s Brightlight Pictures. Passengers, a feature film for Hollywood’s Mandate Pictures and Persistent Entertainment, began shooting in Vancouver Jan. 15 and wraps early March.

Dana Lee is assistant professor, School of Radio and Television Arts, Ryerson University in Toronto, and has written the book Television Technical Theory: Unplugged, used by operations departments in television and teaching facilities.

In January 1957, the CBC broadcast a tough, short documentary set in the dives and flophouses of Downtown Eastside Vancouver. Strikingly shot in black and white with moving scenes of drunks fighting in alleyways and panhandlers begging passers-by for change, it depicted the lives of downtrodden members of Canadian society. That film was Skidrow, and it retains the capacity to shock and touch a viewer. It also marked the debut of Allan King, one of Canada’s finest filmmakers.

As the fabled indie fest gets underway in Utah, crowds have taken a shine to both Sarah Polley’s Away From Her and the enviro-minded Manufactured Landscapes

Filmmakers mark you calendars, you have four weeks to submit your five-minute masterpiece to the CTV/Fox reality series On the Lot, on the way from Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion has tapped Manitoba MP and former North of 60 star Tina Keeper as his Heritage critic

The federal agency’s new programs for English creatives working in Quebec will confound even the most fluent anglophones