Tattersall and friends bring home a BAFTA

It was on his way to NAB2005 in Las Vegas that Alex Olegnowicz, president of Toronto post shop Imarion, received an elated phone call from local filmmaker Stuart Samuels. Samuels had just heard that his documentary about 1970s cult flicks, Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, had just been accepted at the Cannes Film Festival.

Summer’s nearly here, meaning the local multiplex will be bursting with blockbuster tales of futuristic worlds and caped crusaders. And for the past several years, many of the biggest of these fantasy films have been produced in Vancouver. The same can be said of the small screen, with nets such as Sci Fi Channel in the U.S. shooting its most popular shows in B.C. All these producers are taking advantage of the city’s inherent advantages and the infrastructure that has blossomed since the mid-1990s.

Building a state-of-the-art studio facility in Regina was a bit of a gamble, but it’s already paying off with a dramatic jump in local production. Meanwhile, Alberta may be looking to build a comparable studio in the Calgary area over the next two years, and the Manitoba government just purchased the province’s only all-season studio.

All of Vancouver’s major studio facilities are booked solid right through summer, a situation few would have anticipated six months ago, when the local production biz was in the middle of what appeared to be a serious slump.

A slow cycle for feature films and drama series accounts for a precipitous 18% drop in Canadian production spending in 2004, according to results from Playback’s 17th Annual Report on Independent Production.

Montreal’s film festival woes continue to send ripples of trouble right across the country, first in Halifax and, more recently, at home, where Claude Chamberlan, director and founder of the Festival du nouveau cinéma Montréal, up and left after more than 30 years with the festival.
Chamberlan’s departure, resulting from a conflict with the festival’s new general director André Lamy, has baffled observers and sent another tremor through the city’s already shaky festival scene.

An application for a new English-language pay television service is putting the spotlight on competition and the CRTC’s pay-TV policies.

A new wing of the Toronto International Film Festival is looking to give Canuck filmmakers a leg up on the international scene by providing year-round help with marketing, networking and talent searches.

Year two for the Broadcaster Envelopes initiative at the Canadian Television Fund shows, in a final tally, $129.5 million has been allocated to independent producers by Canada’s French- and English-language broadcasters in 2005 – the lion’s share going to the French market, where 21 broadcasters divvied up $68.9 million, or 53%, among children’s, documentaries, drama and variety programs.

Gatineau, QC: More than 300 Quebec producers, distributors and broadcasters met here for the APFTQ’s annual convention April 26-27, where the emphasis was on maximizing the potential of international markets.

Vancouver: The Collector, a sophomore series for CHUM shot in Vancouver by No Equal Entertainment, collected another 30 Leo Award nominations for 2005 – set to be celebrated May 27 and 28 – upping substantially the record-setting 21 nods from last year.

Halifax: As always, the annual study of movie-going dollars and demographics by consultant Howard Lichtman was the must-see slide show of ShowCanada. Must see and don’t blink, that is, because he talked at auctioneer speed for almost a full hour.
Bottom line? The Canadian box-office take was up less than 1% in Canada last year to $952 million according to the 500-page thinkpiece assembled by his Toronto-based Lightning Group.

Halifax: It was hard to get away from Ricky, Julian and Bubbles at this year’s ShowCanada. Time and again, there they were. Around every corner, at every podium. Holding a press conference, introducing a highlight reel or smoking out behind the hotel – the boys of Trailer Park Boys were front and center to pre-hype their soon-to-shoot movie.

The Hot Sheet tracks Canadian box-office results for the period April 22-28 and television ratings for the period April 25 – May 1.