Certainly the ability to determine your own destiny is an exciting prospect for any professional. But there are advantages and disadvantages to setting out to launch your own company.

Vancouver: With an expected cost-slashing provincial budget announcement just 15 days away, a delegation from British Columbia’s Community Marketing Group will be in Victoria Feb. 4 to ‘suggest’ ways the Liberal government can reduce its interest in the local film industry.

Montreal: Telefilm Canada supported just under 20% of the production and post-production projects submitted to its Low Budget Independent Feature Film Assistance Program in 2001/02. The agency received 66 project submissions this year, 49 for production financing and 17 for post-production support, with 13 accepted, mostly in the production financing category. Eighty projects were submitted in 2000/01.

Montreal: The 40-year partnership of John Dunning and Andre Link is unique in the annals of the Canadian film industry. When their company, Cinepix, was launched in 1962, the landscape included little more than CBC, Radio-Canada and the National Film Board.

Guy Maddin has served as his own director of photography on the six-minute short The Heart of the World and on some of his features, and for that he won’t apologize.

Fujifilm Canada is marketing a new film stock that it is calling the world’s first high-speed, daylight-balanced color negative film. The Reala 500D (35mm: 8592 & 16mm: 8692) complements Fuji’s F-500 tungsten-balanced stock and its E.I. 64 and 250 daylight stocks.

Montreal: It’s celebrity watch time all the time these days. A local publicist: ‘Me and my girlfriends are going to start hanging around hotel lobbies waiting for Brad and Matt. Brad Pitt and Matt Damon,’ she adds, picking up on the slow uptake. A handout printed in oversized letters for local crew on the George Clooney feature debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind strictly prohibits any and all photos. Montreal Film Commissioner Andre Lafond tells the host of an early morning CBC radio show the sets of all the U.S. movie shoots in town are closed. Security is tight, but that’s not the problem, he says. The bigger concern is the freelance snoops with telephoto lens targeting unsuspecting stars (at play) from as far away as two city blocks.

Montreal: A growing wave of Montreal producers, including primetime French-language suppliers, are trying their hand at English TV drama as a way to diversify.

Vancouver: Not only does Vancouver get to host the action picture Ecks vs. Sever because of international security concerns, but now we get to play ourselves.
The mid-range-budget picture – starring Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas as rogue agents out to get each other – was originally set in Bangkok. But after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the production was moved back to North America to be closer to Los Angeles.
Directed by Kaos, a Thai making his Hollywood debut, the film is being shot with wide angles and old-fashioned physical effects – meaning that the location is integral to the story and computer graphics will not be used to enhance, for instance, the explosions.

First Jackie Chan, now Chow Yun-Fat. Yun-Fat, who confirmed his status as one of the world’s most popular action stars with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is coming to Toronto to film MGM’s Bulletproof Monk, an action flick based on a comic-book miniseries.
The F/X and martial-arts-laden movie tells the story of a nameless, ageless monk (Yun-Fat), who has protected an uber-powerful ancient scroll for decades. His search for a successor leads to a streetwise kid named Kar, played by Seann William Scott (American Pie). James King (Pearl Harbor) is on board as a Russian princess sidekick named Bad Girl.

St. John’s-based Kickham Productions’ founder Anita McGee (New Neighbours), a staple of the Newfoundland production community, is set to direct and produce a new feature film called The Bread Maker, penned by Sherry White (Beyond Zerba, Blue Blazes) who will also star.
The Bread Maker is about a woman who is a bread maker by day and romance novelist by night. When a personal relationship interferes with the quality of her writing and book sales, she must find a way to win back her waning audience.

Regina-based Minds Eye Pictures is in development on a feature film called End of the Soo Line from writer William Boyle (Now & Forever). The film is set during the prohibition era when much of the bootleg alcohol sold in the U.S. was made in southern Saskatchewan and transported on the Soo rail line to Chicago.
The story is about a trip taken by legendary mobster Al Capone to Saskatchewan to escape the heat in Chicago.