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.

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. 

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.

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.