Vancouver: With the creation of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of British Columbia April 25, the stage is set for the B.C. government to restructure how the film industry works on the West Coast.

Montreal: Savage Messiah (Moise), Mario Azzopardi’s powerful psychological portrait of diabolical cult leader Roch Theriault, earned $666,850 in its first 10 days of release (Quebec only), with coproducer Muse Entertainment and Christal Films Distribution anticipating the film will hit the coveted $1-million mark at the box office. The film opened number one in Quebec over the April 26-28 weekend, pulling in more than $322,000 on 54 screens.

Two new local stations in the Toronto market will cut into CHUM Television’s revenues by an estimated $12 million, the broadcaster says, forcing it to cut local programming.

* Recently hired 18-year industry veteran James Keegan has been appointed to the new position of chief administrative officer for Lions Gate Entertainment.

The dollar totals spent on indigenous Canadian film and TV production in 2001 were down in each of the three major centres – 2% in Quebec, 10% in Ontario and an estimated 30% in B.C. Yet it is difficult to slot these figures into any kind of general trend, as they come after years of growth and an out-of-the-ordinary 12 months last year.

The following is a chart indicating where independent production companies spent their money in 2001.

After spending 2001 packaging and marketing the previous year’s output, Toronto prodco GFT Entertainment is in the midst of a hectic production schedule on the features Crime Spree, Absolon and Partners in Action, all of which are Canada/U.K. coprods shooting in Toronto.
The three films are coproduced with the U.K.’s Studio Eight, with international distribution from L.A.’s Hannibal Pictures and Canadian distribution from Alliance Atlantis. Credited producers are GFT president/CEO Gary Howsam, Studio Eight’s Jamie Brown and Hannibal’s Richard Rionda Del Castro.

Montreal: Lots of drama and factual production is planned for production house Point de Mire this season, including 30 one-hour episodes of the Reseau TVA teleroman Emma III and 10 hours of the new Radio-Canada series La Grande Ourse.
La Grande Ourse is billed as Quebec’s first primetime fantasy melodrama, a cross between the supernaturalism of The X-Files and the small-town creepiness of Twin Peaks, says PDM producer Raymond Gauthier.
Grande Ourse, which translates as both ‘Big Bear,’ the name of the small village, and starry ‘Big Dipper,’ is budgeted at a cool $8 million, with funding from the Licence Fee Program and Telefilm Canada.

Vancouver: The new partnership of Vancouver producers Stephen Hegyes and Shawn Williamson of Brightlight Pictures is generating a critical mass of in-house and service production.
While romantic comedy Try Seventeen wrapped May 1, the made-in-Vancouver, Canadian-content drama Punch wraps a month of production May 17.
The debut feature for writer/director Guy Bennett, Punch explores a father’s and daughter’s volatile relationship and their struggle to find the right emotional distance.

Montreal: This month’s U.K. budgetary provisions will have a highly adverse and immediate impact on Canadian coproduction. The new rules wipe out state-backed financing for TV production.
In effect as of April 17, the U.K. budget states only ‘films intended for theatrical release at the commercial cinema’ qualify as British films for purposes of sale and leaseback transactions with the resulting tax break. TV series and MOWs no longer qualify.

Montreal: Participation at MIPTV 2002 was down about 9% to 10,200 delegates, but the expanded Canada pavilion, sheltering 52 companies, was a hive of activity. Formats and factual programming were at the top in the genre rankings. Asian delegations returned and many in attendance sensed better market conditions are just around the corner.
But the ever-resilient and optimistic MIP troopers kept getting sideswiped by economic bombshells posing as news stories out of Germany, France and the U.K. Delegates from those countries were bowled over by business developments, and anybody doing business with them, which is mostly everybody, shared in the shock.

Vancouver: In his maiden speech as the newly installed chair of the CRTC, Charles Dalfen told 900 delegates at the 2002 Canadian Cable Television Association conference in Vancouver that the commission will step up its support for efforts to stamp out black-market satellite systems.
‘The black market is hurting us all,’ said Dalfen, ‘and threatens to draw away money from the Canadian broadcasting system as a whole through, for example, the depletion of the Canadian Television Fund, which is dependent on licensed distributors for half of its revenues. To the extent that new legislation may be required to limit the black market, we will lend our full support.’