Thirty-three programs including 18 live-action productions in four age categories and 15 animation series in three age categories are among the nominees for the 2003 edition of the Alliance for Children and Television Awards of Excellence. Prizes will be handed out at a June 2 gala at CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, with ubiquitous children’s TV host Joe Motiki as MC.

Vancouver: Television series Da Vinci’s Inquest and feature Flower & Garnet dominated the 2003 Leo Awards nominations announced April 16.

Vancouver: While the fate of Omni Film’s teen soap Edgemont is in limbo following the recent Licence Fee Program announcements from the Canadian Television Fund, the production company’s new half-hour anthology series Keys Cut Here successfully ran the gauntlet. In fact, B.C. overall fared not too badly relative to the rest of the country reeling from funding, and now production, cuts.

Of the big three networks, CTV is hardest hit by the CTF LFP returns – failing to secure funding for The Eleventh Hour and seven of its planned MOWs for ’03/04. All but two of those come from Ontario production houses.

Montreal: Quebec’s three leading private broadcasters, Reseau TVA, Television Quatre Saisons and Astral Media, are calling on the Canadian Television Fund’s board of directors to immediately establish a special allocation of at least $8 million for French-language, private broadcasters’ programs rejected in this spring’s LFP round.

Cinar to seek new TSX listing

In what is being framed as a ‘catastrophic’ blow to Canadian TV drama, producers have been left picking their jaws up off the sidewalk after a full 64% of CTF applications were turned down earlier this month. This, following a year of hand-wringing over the state of Canadian drama in the wake of declines in new programming and a stall in production growth in 2002.

Peter Flemington, a founder of VisionTV and its head of programming for a dozen years, teaches and produces and serves on the international advisory board of INDICO.

Movie Central is among the financial backers of Decoys, the sci-fi comedy featured in the April 14 story ‘CHUM shoots Decoys for BO success.’

When a US$3-million feature documentary rakes in a reported US$40 million in worldwide box office, it’s bound to cause a stir in the non-fiction world. Granted, Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine, brought to life with Canadian prodco Alliance Atlantis, is no average doc. Not many such films are directed by and feature a celebrity with a book (Stupid White Men) on the bestseller shelves. But its success has some debating whether it will help more feature docs achieve a high profile in Canada.

Docs are indeed hot. Maybe it’s due to the fact that with such extreme and dramatic real-life, realtime images all over the news these days, the dramas and comedies are starting to look artificial and banal. It could be that in these tighter economic times, shot-on-video docs present a necessary alternative to dramatic production. Whatever the case, there is clearly a larger-than-ever audience for a less constructed rendition of reality, its most low-rent manifestation being the ‘reality TV’ overwhelming the airwaves.

Gerry Flahive is a documentary producer at the National Film Board in Toronto. His upcoming productions include Almost Real: Connecting in a Wired World and the series The Next Big Thing.