Vancouver: Checkbox #24: Expand financial management skills of industry. Checkbox #5: Streamline tax policy administration and application processes. Checkbox #20: Enhance regional bonus on tax polices to promote increased production beyond the Lower Mainland. Checkbox #14: Work with communities to ensure that producers have quick, easy and reliable access to locations. Checkbox #29: Mount PR campaign to foster greater understanding and support of industry regionally, provincially and nationally.

Sharp marketing has been a cornerstone in the rise of the Toronto International Film Festival from a mid-level alternative player to one of the major stops on the festival calendar. In the last decade alone, TIFF has evolved into a bona fide brand that would make the top brass at Coca-Cola or McDonald’s proud.

Reality might seem to be a liability at the Toronto International Film Festival, an international showcase for dramatic features. But the festival has long invited Canadian documentary makers into the tent, and this year is featuring five feature-length documentaries and a handful of homegrown shorts in its Perspective Canada series.

You may not be able to make a living off short films, but filmmakers traditionally use them to springboard into long form and to experiment with style and content. And while still falling behind Europe in terms of appreciating and providing a market for short films, Canada is beginning to recognize them as a unique and valuable art form.

Montreal: In Canadian distribution news, Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm reports Ricardo Trogi’s road movie comedy Quebec-Montreal has earned just over $500,000 at the box office since its Aug. 2 release on 40 screens. AAV also reports the Denise Filiatrault family satire L’Odyssee d’Alice Tremblay has surpassed the $2-million mark after nine weeks in Quebec theatres. It’s an especially strong showing as 40% of admissions has been for children at reduced ticket prices.

Following are highlights of this year’s Prix Gemeaux finalist list in selected categories. For the full list of nominees, check out the ACCT website at www.academy.ca.

Montreal: It has been nothing short of a battle for survival for this year’s 17th edition of the Prix Gemeaux. The awards showcase – dedicated to honoring excellence in French-language television – has been the target of a blistering partisan attack from a small but select group of powerful and disgruntled producers, their friends in the media and conventional private-sector broadcasters.

Toronto hosts what is considered the second-largest film festival in the world, but for Canadian filmmakers, the paradox of TIFF is the odds against homegrown talent finding and winning over buyers in what sometimes seems like a Turkish bazaar.

There is far too much ‘chance and zeitgeist,’ in Hussain Amarshi’s words, to predict with any real accuracy the chance of success for any given film. Everyone rolls the dice. But if he and his company, distributor Mongrel Media, have proven anything in the last eight years, it is that those dice can, with smart choices and precise marketing, be loaded.

Montreal: Cirrus Communications begins taping in HD Sept. 11 on the eight-hour series Les Aventures tumulteuses de Jack Carter, an entirely new kind of cop show for the Quebec TV market, promises producer Jacques Blain.
The series is one of four dramas and two documentary series on the house’s busy fall/winter production slate.
Jack Carter is mostly shooting in Montreal and environs, over three and a half months (nine shooting days per episode) to late December, with additional episode footage to be shot in February 2003.

Winnipeg: director Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary, a made-for-TV adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s performance based on the Bram Stoker novel, is being transferred to 35mm for theatrical release in Canada, the U.S. and overseas next year, more than a year after debuting on CBC’s Opening Night in February.
‘I never dreamt that there would be a theatrical release, and I have some pretty arrogant daydreams,’ says Maddin. ‘I just didn’t think anyone would want to risk the expense of running prints of a dance film for theatrical release.’

* Director/writer: Deepa Mehta * Producers: David Hamilton, Camelia Frieberg, Ajay Virmani, Bob Wertheimer * Cinematographer: Doug Koch