At least he can laugh about the timing.

Heaton honored for underwater work

NSI, Global partner

But he was funny at the WGC Awards… In response to our Playback online poll, ‘Which of these shows passed over by the CTF would you miss the least?’ 39.1% of respondents voted for The Sean Cullen Show, followed by The Eleventh Hour (16.3%), The Red Green Show (14.8%), Km/h (12.3%) and This Hour Has 22 Minutes (8.9%). The programming Playback readers would most like to see spared are CTV MOWs, which got 8.6% of the vote.

There’s still a lot of adjustment required in the Canadian film industry. The industry has made a strong public case for government funding support for priority Canadian TV programs, and two of the three declared Liberal leadership candidates, Paul Martin and Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, are clearly onside. As such, it’s hardly surprising these days that the Canadian industry is so focused on internal issues, like the CTF funding crisis. And while it is understandable, the CTF crisis itself is a strong indicator the industry must absolutely move forward in terms of international production financing and in terms of our export position.

Sharon Groom is a member of the KNOWlaw Group of Toronto law firm McMillan Binch.

Luc Montpellier made up his mind about working with director Guy Maddin when the director of photography saw The Heart of the World, Maddin’s short for the Toronto International Film Festival’s 2000 Preludes series. The Genie Award-winning film is a silent throwback to Metropolis and the Soviet agitprop of Sergei Eisenstein.

DOP Luc Montpellier considers his back-to-back, polar opposite experiences on The Saddest Music in the World and the recently aired Shaftesbury Films/CBC miniseries Hemingway vs. Callaghan as the ideal situation for any cinematographer.

Vancouver: Year-over-year volume and value are up for B.C. production, so far. At press time, 13 features were prepping or in production, with five starts in March-April and the balance gearing up for May-June.
Among the new titles is Final Cut, a Lions Gate Films feature with Robin Williams in the lead and service-produced by Vancouver’s Ogden Gavanski.
The script, to be shot for less than $10 million, is a near-future story about a society that implants chips in people’s brains to record their lives through their eyes.

It’s getting so that an honest, occasionally hard-working reporter can’t keep up with the goings-on at the National Film Board – which, in the past few weeks, has launched a new awards show, partnered with APTN on native films, and turned out huge buzz at Hot Docs with its closing-night feature The Last Round. And now, as if reading those three (three!) press releases wasn’t enough work, comes word that our dear old board is in production on five new docs in Ontario. Oy.

Montreal: Leading man Roy Dupuis plays a French-Canadian musician swept up in the glory days of the Montreal jazz scene in Gilles Noel’s evocative historical drama Jack Paradis, which films over 25 days from April 22 to May 28.
Noel (Erreur sur la personne, Le Pays dans la gorge) wrote the screenplay based on an original idea by Richard Langlois. Anouk Brault of Nanouk Films and Aimee Danis of Verseau International are producing.

Montreal: L’Association des Realisateurs et Realisatrices du Quebec, representing French-language directors in film and TV, has awarded its 2003 Prix Lumiere career contribution award to Fernand Dansereau.