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Fierce Light in Europe - The National Film Board has announced that  Velcrow Ripper's Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action, which features some of the most remarkable spiritual activists of our times, has been picked up for distribution by TAO Cinemathek GmbH.
The company plans to release a German version of the Genie Award-winning documentary later this year in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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ACE Honours AVID - The American Cinema Editors society has  announced that their Board of Directors has given Avid® Media Composer® software the Board's first-ever "ACE Technical Excellence Award" -- recognizing it as the preferred choice of the industry's most acclaimed editors. |
CTV Defies Gravity - Laura Harris will costar in a new US-Canada TV series that sees lead  network CTV score another sale south of the border. Defying Gravity, being shot in Vancouver, has been picked up by ABC in the United States, the BBC in the UK and on ProSieben in Germany. |
Filmport now Pinewood - Paul Bronfman, chairman of a new  ownership consortium, has announced that Pinewood Shepperton plc has concluded a comprehensive sales and marketing agreement for Toronto's largest studio operation, formerly known as Filmport Studios and now renamed Pinewood Toronto Studios. |
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Roger Abbott turns 63 today. He began his career off the air in programming and management at a number of radio stations  in the 1960s, including Montreal's CKGM, before accidentally stumbling into comedy. He was one of the co-founders of The Royal Canadian Air Farce in 1973. The Air Farce began life as The Jest Society, which was started by John Morgan and Martin Bronstein, along with Gay Claitman, Roger Abbott and author and broadcaster, Patrick Conlon. In 1971 they decided to leave Montreal and head to Toronto where Don Ferguson, Luba Goy and Dave Broadfoot were invited to join the troupe. They made their CBC Radio debut on Dec. 9, 1973 as The Royal Canadian Air Farce. They turned their radio success into a one hour special on CBC-TV in October, 1980 and that led the CBC to commission a 10 week series, which began airing in February 1981. |
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Anyone familiar with Montreal knows that July brings the promise of tropical days and steamy nights and one of the few places of refuge from summer's heat is the air conditioned movie theatre. Maurie Alioff contributes to  Canada's hottest film province by taking an in-depth look at the latest offering from writer-director Émile Gaudreault. De père en flic could be the first box office hit of the summer season. Vying for attention is the teen comedy À vos marques Party! 2, which was released on 100 screens in the province. Producers in the rest of the country would kill to be released on that many screens coast-to-coast. The screenwriter behind such huge hits as La Grande Seduction and Maurice Richard steps behind the camera for the first time to direct such stars as Roy Dupuis and Patrice Robitaille in Les Doights croches, which translates into Sticky Fingers.And there's an in-depth look at one of the most exotic film festivals in the world, Montreal's FanTasia Film Festival which runs for three weeks. |
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Before Tomorrow was released theatrically on March 27, 2009 and then rolled out across the country right up until early June. It had previously made the rounds of various film festivals and was an official  selection at Sundance and the Toronto International. The DVD was released on July 7th.
Much has already been written about the film, but it seems like the single constant selling point is the fact that this is the final installment of a triology of films that began with Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) and continued with The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006). I was not expecting this DVD release of Before Tomorrow to contain all three films, but I hope at some point a distributor will package them as a set. I have mixed feelings about the film. While I can certainly understand how it might cause some reviewers to wax poetic about the landscape, in my opinion there is little enough to see let alone write about. |
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