Peter Weller stars as Bill Lee in David Cronenberg’s 1991 feature Naked Lunch.

According to actor Ralph Fiennes, someone once joked that when meeting David Cronenberg for the first time, ‘You expect to meet a freak, and instead meet someone a bit like an L.A. gynecologist. He has something of a doctor’s clarity and precision about him.’

President and CEO of Toronto’s Capri Films, Gabriella Martinelli produced David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly as well as Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, in which Cronenberg performs. She also served as coproducer on Naked Lunch and as production manager and post-production supervisor on Dead Ringers.

It was 18 years ago that director of photography Peter Suschitzky embarked on what he describes as the most important professional relationship of his career.

Editor Ronald Sanders

Actor/writer/director Don McKellar performs in David Cronenberg’s feature eXistenZ (1999), while Cronenberg appears in McKellar’s feature Last Night (1998) and stars in his short Blue (1992).

Vincenzo Natali is the director of the feature dramas Cypher, Nothing and the international sci-fi hit Cube.

It was one year ago that private Montreal firm SECOR released its report on the state of film festivals across Canada. Due to the report’s scolding of the management of Montreal’s World Film Festival for being distant, difficult and ineffectual, Telefilm Canada and SODEC announced that they would withdraw their annual funding for the event starting in 2005. They declared that the money, which adds up to nearly $1 million, would go instead to a new and improved international film festival.

Montreal’s World Film Fest founder and president Serge Losique has long contended that his event is an exercise in class. If the Toronto International Film Festival were the Hollywood equivalent of a Big Mac, he considers his fest a glass of fine European wine. TIFF is a video game, WFF has subtitles – or so the WFF-made mythology goes. It’s a contrast Losique and his crew have gone out of their way to highlight in interviews over the years.

It always seemed a strange fit. The World Film Festival likes to position itself as an event with old-world European snob appeal. And then, all of a sudden, it was championing Karla, the controversial yet unseen movie about serial sex-killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.

It must be the strangest and most conspicuous comeback in years. Larry Kent, the Canadian filmmaking pioneer behind such highly regarded works as The Bitter Ash (1963) and High (1967), has returned to features after a 13-year hiatus with The Hamster Cage, a stylish melodrama that will have its premiere at the World Film Festival.

A trio of investors – Jeff Sagansky, Kerry McCluggage and Drew Craig – has put $2 million into Peace Arch Entertainment and taken various seats at its table.

The CRTC has ruled that, although ‘completely inappropriate,’ a racial slur used on air by Tele-Quebec talk show host Benoit Dutrizac does not qualify as abusive language under federal rules. Dutrizac was under investigation for a Jan. 9 airing of Les Francs-tireurs and a segment on street crime in which he referred, in French, to ‘nigger gangs’ in Montreal. Acting on a viewer complaint, the Commission found that the remark was a lapse on Dutrizac’s part, but ‘not contemptuous or hateful’ as defined and prohibited by federal regulations.

The deal is done, the players are putting away their golf clubs, and Canada’s national game will return to the ice this fall. The big question for broadcasters is: will the fans and advertisers be back?
As the dust settles from the NHL players lockout, all sides may well be pondering the fallout that hit Major League Baseball in the U.S. after its 1994 strike – when Americans soured on their national sport, keeping attendance and viewership sluggish for years.
Some marketers and sports consultants predict the same problem will hit hockey and, according to recent reports, Canuck casters have cut their ad rates for the coming season by 20% from those of 2003/04 – banking that one-fifth of fans, in the short term at least, will not tune in this fall.

Production workers and support staff at CBC are ready to hit the picket line Aug. 15 to back demands for greater job security, following a July ballot in which members of the Canadian Media Guild voted 87.3% in favor of a strike.
A 21-day cooling-off period is in place. Both sides and two federally appointed mediators plan to continue negotiating up to the strike deadline. CMG represents 5,500 employees at CBC.
The vote comes at a bad time for the public broadcaster. An August strike could cancel its broadcasts of the Canadian Football League season and of the Canada Games in Regina.