Montreal: While there is overwhelming support for CTV’s licence renewal application for Montreal affiliate CFCF-TV, heavyweight industry intervenors are asking the CRTC to oblige CTV to pick up the tab for unfulfilled past benefits promises made by former station owners – notably WIC Television, which promised $7 million in benefits over five years back in 1997.

For Canadian filmmakers, the significance of the Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Atlantic film festivals, about to pass in rapid succession, can not be overstated. Especially for first-time filmmakers, often working with seemingly impossible budgets, the festival season provides an opportunity for recognition and a vital portal into an often hard-to-crack industry.

* Telefilm Canada has announced three management appointments. Sheila de La Varende, director of the European office in Paris, has been appointed to the concurrent position of director, International Development and Promotion, formerly known as the International Relations division. She was previously acting director, International Relations.
Stephane Odesse has been appointed general counsel and Access to Information co-ordinator. A member of the Quebec Bar, he specialized in intellectual property and financing in the private sector prior to joining Telefilm Canada as legal counsel in 1994. Odesse is responsible for co-ordinating matters concerning the Access to Information Act and for directing the Legal Department.
Louise Deslauriers has been promoted to director, Feature Films Business Unit – Quebec, the position she held on an interim basis since Feb. 2002. She was a senior investment analyst with Telefilm for the past four years.

Montreal: The 26th edition of the Montreal World Film Festival is certainly living up to its name, with 406 films from 75 countries, including 248 world premieres, 214 feature films, 33 medium-length films and 159 short films on the program.

Montreal: Hopes are definitely on the high side for two Canadian films selected for official competition in this year’s Montreal World Film Festival.

Montreal: Quebec film and TV producers have a long pioneering history of coproduction with Europe, mostly with France but increasingly with the U.K. And 2002 is no exception.
Among the most active Quebec houses in coproduction are Transfilm, CineGroupe, Cite-Amerique, Cinemaginaire, Max Films, Mediatoon, Pixcom Productions, Muse Entertainment, Tooncan, Galafilm, Park Ex Pictures, Remstar Productions, Equinox Entertainment and Cinar Corp.

The following is a summary of Canadian films and coproductions selected for upcoming festivals:

According to the filmmakers, nothing really compares to Nothing. ‘It has things in it I don’t think anyone’s really done before,’ says director Vincenzo Natali.
The premise of the feature, currently shooting in Toronto, might sound familiar enough: the codependent and anti-social Andrew (Andrew Miller) and David (David Hewlett) room together in a grimy house and their friendship becomes the focal point of their world.

Having had success with the pilot for the political comedy Rideau Hall, which aired on CBC in January, Halifax-based Topsail Entertainment is busy producing the first full season of the series, six half-hours for the public broadcaster.
The series, shooting in Halifax Aug. 5 to Sept. 6 and slated to debut Oct. 11, is penned by Made in Canada writers Ed Macdonald, Alex Ganetakos and Bob Martin. Directors Allan Nicholls (Saturday Night Live), Ron Murphy (Gavin Crawford Show) and Michael Kennedy (Kids in the Hall) will helm two episodes each.

For the first time in its recent history, well-traveled prodco Summerhill Entertainment is staying close to home, and shooting its newest series at a nearby bar. The Toronto company – best known for its Canadian Geographic Presents series on Discovery – begins production this month on 65 half-hour eps of Out of Bounds…with John Oakley.

Vancouver: Local crews can count on dogs and murderers to keep the slow summer from being truly beastly.
Air Bud: Buddy Spikes Back is the fifth installment in the family film franchise. In this one, the golden retriever expands his athletic repertoire – which already includes basketball, football, soccer and baseball – to volleyball. He also gets dognapped, and the kids have to save him and the bumbling crooks are foiled and all that, too.

TVA Films (formerly TVA International) has entered joint ventures with Christal Films Distribution in Quebec to create Topaze Communications and Lions Gate Films in English Canada to create JV Media. Working with its partners, TVA continues to oversee the distribution of theatrical, video/DVD and television product, contrary to a report in the July 22 issue of Playback, ‘Media giants go up and down.’

Bollywood/Hollywood, the latest feature by director Deepa Mehta, will open the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival’s Perspective Canada program, which is marked by healthy numbers of returning filmmakers, directorial debuts, East Coast productions and documentaries.
Bollywood/Hollywood combines elements of Indian and U.S. cinema in a musical comedy about an Indo-Canadian dot-com millionaire (Rahul Khanna) who hires an escort (Lisa Ray) to act as his Indian bride to appease his family. David Hamilton produced the film, reportedly budgeted around $2 million. The film is a departure for Mehta, coming on the heels of dramas Earth and Fire. When production on the third film of that trilogy, Water, ground to a halt in India, Mehta decided to return to Toronto and make the comedy. She insists the decision was neither an about-face following the sometimes-violent reception to her films in her Indian homeland nor a reaction to the global mood following 9/11.

The kitchen and living room bring slacker living to new extremes. The low-ceiling squalor, perfumed with smoke, is adorned with Christmas tree lights, bubble wrap, police tape and computer mouses dangling from the walls. The refrigerator is decorated with fragmented pictures of pinup girls, and the bread in the toaster looks like it’s been there a week. The furniture and greasy, paint-chipped appliances are littered with plastic plates, comics and candy jars. Next to the living room window, a turtle tries vainly to escape the confines of an aquarium.
Welcome to the world of Nothing’s David and Andrew (David Hewlett and Andrew Miller), a pair of outcasts who want to wish the rest of the world away. A calamitous occurrence ensues and they achieve that desire – the world they inhabit becomes an ever-expanding physical void, and at a certain point all the viewer will see is selected body parts against a white background. The producer, Toronto’s 49th Parallel Films, describes the comedic buddy film, budgeted at a reported US$4 million, as ‘Withnail and I in space.’ Director Vincenzo Natali calls it ‘low-end Beckett.’

Playback is scouring the Canadian industry for novel approaches to production financing that sidestep the Canadian Television Fund. Plan B will be a semi-regular, ongoing feature that profiles the people, strategies, ideas, conflicts and successes that prove that Canadian production can thrive without government handouts.