Screen Siren Pictures Inc.

I Shot The Sheriff

With the heart of Brokeback Mountain and the audacity of Thelma & Louise, I Shot The Sheriff brings two revolutionary heroines to the screen in this sexy revisionist take on the classic western.

Set in the 1860’s, this action adventure love story charts the journey of sharpshooter Nell Clanfield, who outwits the banks, ambushes trains and outruns the law in order to save her family farm from corrupt railway developers. En route, Nell falls for her whip-smart sidekick, Fred (aka the Manitoba Kid), a young, educated Métis woman who dresses in men’s clothes.

When Nell is forced to draw her twin Colt 45’s in order to save Fred’s life she accidentally kills Jackson, the loyal companion of the meanest sonofabitch in town, Caswell Stone. On the run, Nell and the Kid develop a plan to rob the villains who are repossessing Nell’s family farm. But on the day, everything goes awry.

Stone and his posse give chase across the rugged frontier, pursuing our heroines into an impossible dead end. Trapped in the foothills and low on ammunition, Nell and the Kid engage in a final life-and-death shootout from which only one will walk away alive.

Wherefore Art Thou Romeo? / Pourquoi Es-Tu Roméo?

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet tells the story of two young lovers who together indulge in their illicit desires and fall prey to their respective clans’ mutual hatred. Their tragic fate serves as a metaphor for young people everywhere whose passions fly in defiance of barriers of background and history as they love one another in spite of, or perhaps even fuelled by, their families’ fierce opposition.

Our Quebec 1918 version will be Romeo and Juliet as you’ve never seen it before: architecture and fashion, reckless indulgence and escapism, and societal tension boiling over into bloodshed and tragedy. Romeo and Juliet fall in love at the peak of Canada’s great conflict between English and French, Protestant and Catholic, rich and dispossessed, colonizer and colonized, British loyalist and Quebec Nationalist. The Canadian government has brought this conflict to a fevered pitch with a single law: the Military Services Act, a conscription law press-ganging French Canadians among others into the British conqueror’s army. A law which leads in the spring of 1918 to great riots and lethal gunfire on the cobbled streets of Quebec City. The stars could not be more crossed for our young lovers.

Our adaptation will remain faithful to the specifics of Romeo and Juliet’s love story, as well as to the play’s dialogue and structure, but will heighten the sexuality and introduce rich atmosphere Quebec City in the early 20th century – a city that is as derelict as it is opulent with Catholic clashing hard against Protestant. The film will unfold in English and French, with specific scenes like the ball and the balcony scenes borrowing selectively from Victor Hugo’s French translation. However new scenes like lavish and violent polo matches, and Romeo and Juliet making love in an opium den, will breath new life into this classic.

In contrast with the original play, our film will give vivid specificity to the rivalry between the two families, reflecting Quebec City’s great political, religious and ethnic divide. The conscription riots polarized the French nationalist and British loyalist camps to an unprecedented degree, raising the stakes from a simmering stand-off to outright conflict, and providing a uniquely spectacular backdrop for this devastating love story. 

To the Wedding

Based on the novel by John Berger, To The Wedding demonstrates that even the cruelest of fates can be endured and transcended through courage, love, and determination.

Taking place in continental Europe on the eve of the 21st century, it’s a world where everything’s changing and not even the certainties of love are exempt.

Beautiful, vibrant Ninon meets and has a whirlwind romance with a young Italian named Gino. But her life abruptly changes when she tests positive for HIV, the legacy of a brief encounter years earlier. She desperately tries to break off the relationship, but Gino will have none of it. In an act of passionate and redemptive love he insists on marrying Ninon despite her illness. Their stories mesh and intercut with those of Ninon’s parents as they travel towards their daughter. Her father John, full of grief, rides his motorcycle along windy European roads, stopping occasionally to offer prayers to a roadside Madonna or ruminate on the future with young computer hackers. Her mother Zdena, a Slovakian intellectual, buys a thrush whistle, evocative of happier times before politics forced her to leave her daughter years earlier, before boarding a bus for Italy. Ninon fights her love for Gino, struggles with her new found status and eventually embraces both.

Finally all arrive at the wedding itself. Set in a little village on the Po River Delta in Italy, it becomes a magical feast in which all the lost and searching souls are drawn together in the bittersweet embrace of Gino and Ninon’s timeless love.

Both tragic and joyous, intelligent and erotic, To The Wedding is a transcendent celebration of passion at the end of the last millennium.

The Leper’s Bell

An ambitious young lawyer gets more than he bargained for when he accepts a mysterious job by an American construction firm operating in the fictional country of Kashiqstan. Incredibly naïve, he believes he is supporting pro-democratic initiatives to re-build the country after civil war; however, the money and power soon compromise his judgment and objectivity. As he begins to lose his moral compass, his ill-fated decision to cover-up a hideous crime he inadvertently commits threatens the stability of his company, the security of the country, and his fragile relationship with his own family.

Adapted from the eponymous novel by Paul Micou, The Leper’s Bell boasts a familiar, if not deliciously dark Faustian tale of one man’s unbridled ambition and the lengths he will go to for position and power. Part political thriller and part morality play, The Leper’s Bell is an evocative, timely story about corruption that certainly proves the age-old quote that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The actual quote precedes a second sentence; “great men are almost always bad men,” which is almost more telling than the first.

Truth Be Known

Truth Be Known is a thirteen part documentary series examines the controversial ideas and people behind today’s most intriguing conspiracy theories and popular internet mysteries.

Truth Be Known introduces ordinary people struggling with unexplainable mysteries, and shares the adventures of researchers uncovering buried secrets and hidden agendas in their pursuit of knowledge. Each episode pursues an intriguing mystery related to the show’s five central themes: conspiracy theories, scary science, hidden history, puzzling places and mystic mythology. Do children remember their past lives? Was Shakespeare a woman? Will long lost technologies provide free energy for the contemporary world? Can science explain near death experiences? Are there shadow government facilities operating underneath the Denver International Airport?

Truth Be Known brings each mystery to life through active investigations, insightful interviews, inventive animations, and well-crafted dramatic experiments, empowering the audience to seek out further conclusions on their own.

Fish Food

What will the world do without fish as food?

Imagine an ocean with no fish and no seafood. Imagine this empty ocean in your lifetime. This is what Canadian scientists predict – the collapse of all wild fish and seafood by 2048.

Nature filmmaker, underwater cameraman and marine biologist Simon Schneider is going on a journey around the world and under water to find out if this is possibly true. And, if it is, what we can do to stop it.

Simon travels to his early fishing grounds on the West Coast of Canada in River’s Inlet. Once teeming with wild salmon, now only a net full of sockeye salmon return to spawn. In the Gulf of Mexico, he searches for life in underwater “dead zones,” areas with so little oxygen that nothing can survive, except for hordes of slimy jellyfish. In the Sea of Japan, he dives with jellyfish that have reached 1950′s horror movie proportions. Most are bigger than Simon, some are bigger than a car.

Just when the future of seafood looks doomed, Simon’s scientist friends take him to five ocean “hot spots” that maintain ideal conditions for thriving populations of fish. These hot spots may hold the answers to saving the world’s oceans from impending collapse.

The question is, will the global community protect them in time and help secure humanity’s primary single source of high quality protein – fish food?

The Jizz Bizz

A one hour documentary about the global sperm trade.

The Jizz Biz is a documentary about the global sperm trade, revealing its reasons for existing whilst taking a critical look at its societal implications. Who knew that sperm’s ability to swim would be looked upon in the same light as an Olympic sport? And that nationality would count for some kind of motile superiority in the little guys’ ability to reach that elusive egg? A two-way trip starting with a sperm donor (most of them are university students), the film will trace sperm’s steps (or rather wriggles) from the donor to the sperm bank, to storage, to shipping until it reaches a recipient. Similarly we’ll retrace the journey beginning with one or two couples (most are either infertile heterosexual couples or gay couples who are seeking donors), revealing what it takes to buy the makings of a baby. Along the way we’ll reveal the people involved in the business of selling bodily fluids and the serious nature of their sales.