It may not have won the Toronto International Film Festival award for best Canadian film, but 21.6% of respondents to a Playback online poll voted The Saddest Music in the World the best Canuck feature they saw at TIFF 2003. Next was the film that did win, The Barbarian Invasions (14.7%), followed by Mambo Italiano (13.7%), Go Further (6.9%), Falling Angels (5.9%), My Life Without Me (4.9%) and Gaz Bar Blues (2.0%). 30.4% indicated they preferred a film not among those listed.

Paul Gratton is chair of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, not vice chair of cinema as reported in the Sept. 15 article ‘CHUM gets Genies in one-year deal.’

TV crews are busy this month with a host of top-shelf shows now underway in and around Toronto. Out at the Dufferin Gate lot, season four of Queer as Folk just started, and will shoot until April for Showcase and U.S.-based Showtime.

Vancouver: CHUM Television, in its first wholly owned and controlled feature film, can be credited with making a road movie that really travels.
Production on the MuchMusic Movie/The Road Movie (final title, we can assume, to come) began in Newfoundland Aug. 25 and has since traveled to Toronto, Montreal and Alberta. Production wraps after a lengthy stint in B.C., with visits to Vancouver’s Stanley Park and the regional hotspots of Yarrow, Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Ladner and White Rock. At press time, the crew was shooting in Tofino on Vancouver Island and was going to Campbell River and Victoria for the final big three days of shooting.

Montreal: Roy Dupuis and Serge Houde are the leads in the intense death-row drama Manners of Dying, director/screenwriter Jeremy Peter Allen’s first feature. Allen directed the award-winning dramatic short Requiem contre un plafond and is a former Kodak Best Director Award winner at the Montreal World Film Festival.

Before there was CSI there was The Murdoch Mysteries, a book series penned by Canadian writer Maureen Jennings about Detective William Murdoch, who shocked his peers with wacky new crime-solving techniques – like dusting for fingerprints. Murdoch’s exploits in Victorian Toronto are being brought to the small screen for CHUM Television/ Bravo! by way of two MOWs from Winnipeg’s Original Pictures and Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films.

Canada will be subject to a new minimum 40% expenditure requirement for theatrical features coproduced with the U.K. Lobbying efforts have not been successful, and now the industry is waiting for what may be a quasi-death knell, in the form of a guidance document from the U.K. Department for Culture, Media and Sport spelling out the exact requirements for qualifying U.K. expenditures. The document was initially expected in July, but might be published only later this fall.

Three… two… and one.
The crane camera nosedives – coming in low across the studio, past a twirling acrobat – as the lights come on, spraying purple and green in all directions. The house band, set against a backdrop of downtown Toronto, is two bars into the opening theme when host Enis Esmer comes bounding out and the announcer booms, ‘Get up and relax! It’s The Toronto Show.’

Alliance Atlantis Communications is spinning off its movie distribution business into an income trust.

Canada’s movie awards have a new home – for next year, at least. The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television announced earlier this month that the 24th edition of the Genie Awards will be produced by CHUM Television, and will air on its Bravo!, Star! and Citytv stations in Toronto and Vancouver.

Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions may have struck twice in the best dramatic series category, but it is Alliance Atlantis’ The Eleventh Hour that leads the pack with 14 overall nominations for the 18th annual Gemini Awards, announced last week by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. Barna-Alper dramas Blue Murder and Da Vinci’s Inquest (which closely trails Eleventh Hour with 11 noms) will take on The Eleventh Hour, Cold Squad and The Atwood Stories for the golden profile on Oct. 20 in Toronto.

Lobby group The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is launching a national advertising blitz with a series of witty spots appealing to the public to get behind English-language drama. The PSA campaign, valued at around $400,000, will begin airing Sept. 17.

So far, so good. By day six (our press day) of the Toronto International Film Festival, nothing had gone horribly wrong – which is unusual in this town, these days, coming off a summer beset by SARS, the West Nile virus, lagging tourism, and the East Coast blackout.
Toronto the Troubled has looked to the 28th edition of the world’s number two fest for a change of luck, and early indications are good.

Black Ace, a feature film in development about Canadian sports trailblazer Herb Carnegie, won Telefilm Canada’s 4th Pitch This! competition at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was one of six pitched at the Sutton Place Hotel, weeded down from 72 submissions, and earned its filmmakers $10,000.

The 4th Calgary International Film Festival (Sept. 26 to Oct. 5) will open and close with a bit of local flavor. CIFF’s opening gala is The Cooler, produced by local-gone-Hollywood Michael Pierce, who is bringing the film’s star William H. Macy to town for the screening. The festival will close with Calgary director Gary Burns’ The Problem with Fear.