A year ago, Playback asked talent agencies across the country to pick their best bets as to hot, up-and-coming writers, directors and actors. Our crystal ball must have been working when we picked out those we thought would distinguish themselves: in…

Scores of young Canadian actors have been given a chance to shine with regular leading roles or special guest appearances in a variety of youth-oriented tv series produced by Montreal’s Telescene Film Group….

DIRECTORS…

ACTORS…

Alliance Atlantis Communications’ children’s label, AAC Kids, and Winklemania have gone to camera on the second season of I Was a Sixth Grade Alien, a 22-episode, half-hour, sci-fi comedy series for ytv in Canada and Fox Family Channel in the u.s….

Halifax-based Chronicle Pictures has a pair of new projects in development. The three-year-old production company gained some notoriety last year with a Gemini nomination for its first, and only project to date, December 1917, a half-hour drama for Global Television….

Vancouver: For six years, wildlife filmmaker Matthew Todd Paproski has toiled on the docudrama Cougar Crossings – just long enough for the Internet to become a major force in the way films are distributed….

Montreal: In the Canada/u.k. coproduction Varian’s War: A Forgotten Hero, William Hurt plays Varian Fry, an American editor who travels to the port city of Marseilles in 1940, and at great risk to his own life, rescues many prominent European artists…

Stephen Yeates, a veteran of Canadian commercial directing, has joined up with Philip Mellows and will now be represented in Canada by the Players Film Company….

Gord Koch has been granted full-time editorship at Toronto post shop Flashcut. After three years assisting Mick Griffin and Norm Odell, Koch has been given his own room and says the main thrust of his work will be devoted to commercial…

Toronto audio post-production houses Tattersall Sound and Casablanca Sound & Picture have merged to form Tattersall Casablanca, a full-service sound and post-production company….

And now, for $200 million, which of the following describes the 2001 Canadian Television Fund: a) a public-private money mix, half doled out by a public agency, half by mainly private interests; b) a private-public money mix, run by a largely…