In response to the Playback online poll question ‘Which Canadian film appearing at TIFF are you most looking forward to?’, 23.6% voted for Les Invasions barbares. Next was The Saddest Music in the World (17.6%), followed by Nothing (13.2%), and, tied with 8.2%, The Republic of Love and A Problem with Fear. 29.1% indicated they would have selected a film other than those mentioned.

Montreal: Forty-one days of filming wrapped Aug. 18 on The Last Sign, a psychological drama with a touch of the supernatural produced by Claude Leger of Transfilm in partnership with the U.K.’s Spice Factory and France’s Groupe Carrere.
The Last Sign stars Andie MacDowell, Tim Roth and Samuel Le Bihan.

Vancouver: With most of British Columbia on high alert, Kelowna, under drifts of ash like the second coming of Mount St. Helens and thousands of families being evacuated from their burning homes, the $160,000 Canadian feature Ill-Fated had to avoid living up to its name.
The comic-tragedy feature, which wrapped a month of production Aug. 31, shot in the Hat Creek Valley near Cache Creek with the huge Ashcroft fire as a backdrop.

‘You’d be flabbergasted if I told you how little our actual marketing budget is,’ says Gabrielle Free, director of communications at the Toronto International Film Festival. ‘We rely very heavily on the press. It’s cheaper to do publicity than marketing.’
TIFF built its reputation back in the early days of the 80s – when it was still called the Festival of Festivals – on positive reports from film writers like Roger Ebert, a longtime attendee and fan. ‘He was quite complimentary,’ says Free and, through his Chicago Sun-Times columns and syndicated TV show, did a lot to spread the word to directors and other media worldwide, creating a ‘snowball effect’ of positive hubbub. That snowball got so big by the 1990s that the fest had little difficulty rebranding itself as a world-class event.

On July 28, Regina-based Minds Eye Entertainment voluntarily applied for bankruptcy protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) in Saskatchewan in a bid to restructure and continue with its core business of film and TV production and international distribution.
‘We’ll be a smaller and leaner company,’ says CEO and president Kevin DeWalt, blaming the volatile international markets for the 17-year-old company’s current financial woes. ‘This is a reality of the times and situations that are out of our control.’

MONTREAL: The country’s two main producer associations, the CFTPA and APFTQ, and CAFDE, the primary distributor association, are urging Telefilm Canada to make important modifications to its proposed EIP recoupment policy.
The industry says Telefilm’s proposal to limit distribution advances to 5% of the budget in the first recoupment position, called tier 1, effectively discourages investment in high-content Canadian productions and will prompt distributors to discount their advances to compensate for their newly downgraded recoupment status.

Alliance Atlantis Communications has executed changes at a couple of its post houses, letting go of Calibre Digital Pictures president and executive producer Pete Denomme and laying off several employees at Tattersall Casablanca.

Maybe there is room for two big studios in Toronto after all, now that both the city and Great Lakes Studios have re-thought their plans to build competing multimillion-dollar soundstages.

Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg will duke it out yet again for the Directors Guild of Canada’s best achievement in directing honor, but not if Wiebke von Carolsfeld and Mario Azzopardi have anything to say about it. The nominees for this and all of the other DGC awards were announced Aug. 14 in Toronto. Egoyan is nominated for Ararat; Cronenberg for Spider; von Carolsfeld for Marion Bridge and Azzopardi for Savage Messiah.

Global Television scored points off CTV earlier this month when it made a surprise grab for Mike Bullard, signing the late-night talk show host to a multi-year contract with the CanWest Global empire. Bullard will bring his gabfest to Global in October, turning out more shows with more money and, it is hoped, reaching international audiences. He will also write a column for the CWG newspaper chain.

Terms for a new contract between Canada’s actors and producers have been made public.

VANCOUVER: Brightlight Pictures in Vancouver has signed a five-picture deal with H2O Motion Pictures of Los Angeles and London, worth $50 million.