Queer as Folk, Slings and Arrows and Made in Canada led the way as the Writers Guild of Canada announced this year’s nominees for the Canadian Screenwriting Awards.

* Corus Entertainment has promoted Joanna Webb to VP programming for its children’s television channels. She will oversee Discovery Kids Canada, Treehouse TV and YTV, while remaining W Network’s acting director of programming.

Nathan Aaron Taylor, one of the men behind the world’s first Cineplex, died of natural causes in Toronto on March 1. He was 98.

Emerging filmmakers were celebrated and supported at the sixth annual National Screen Institute FilmExchange through screenings of features from first-time filmmakers and the announcement of awards that will fund the production of six new shorts over the next year.

Montreal: It’s like receiving a liberal arts education, via 10 days of documentary films. The 22nd annual Festival of Films on Art, March 11-21 in Montreal, is a heady mix of everything from cine-painting and ballet to dance video and architecture. This year, the program includes 240 films and features a tribute to multidiscipline artist Robert Wilson, who will attend.

In 2003, the Atlantic Film Festival doubled in size and posted a 15% increase in attendance, according to data released at its January general meeting. The festival has grown from a single event into an organization that manages several annual cultural events, including the newly created Atlantic Documentary Directors’ Training Opportunity, to be held June 2-6. The program will provide training and production opportunities for emerging documentary directors in Atlantic Canada. The deadline for submissions is April 9 and entry forms can be downloaded from the festival website, www.atlanticfilm.com.

Analog specialty television services in Canada continue to grow and cover the substantial operating losses of the new digital channels, says a new revenue survey of Canadian specialty, pay and pay-per-view television services published by the CRTC on March 2.

Sandra Richmond is a partner in the Toronto law firm of McMillan Binch LLP and a member of the firm’s KNOWlaw Group. This article was written with the assistance of Holly Agnew.

Canada could be proud of its crews at last year’s Academy Awards, when Toronto-shot Chicago took moviedom’s top prize. Now, who would have thought that, 12 months later, an indigenous Canadian movie would take home a best film trophy from Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre? Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions did just that, winning the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

The industry is not optimistic about what it will hear when the federal budget is announced on March 23. In an online Playback poll asking readers ‘Do you anticipate Ottawa will restore its annual $100-million Canadian Television Fund contribution?’ 31.4% voted Yes and 68.6% of respondents voted No.

Stargate SG-1 is a CRTC-certified production, not CAVCO-certified as was reported in the March 1 feature ‘Wright, Cooper prosper as Stargate keepers’. Also, the cast includes Rainbow Sun Francks and Rachel Luttrell.

During the last days of shooting Sex Traffic in Halifax, executive producers Wayne Grigsby and David MacLeod of Big Motion Pictures were faced with the King Kong of snowstorms. Production on the $11.5-million miniseries looked like it was going to be halted as more than three feet of snow covered Halifax just four days before the shoot was set to wrap Feb. 24.