IN DEVELOPMENT

PANDA-MONIUM

When Ruth Harkness arrived in San Francisco on December 18, 1936 carrying a baby Panda, it caused an international sensation. As the newspapers of the day put it “Panda-Monium” broke out everywhere. More than just a female Indiana Jones, Ruth not only introduced the giant panda to the west and the need to conserve it, but is also credited with initiating a dramatic shift in public attitudes towards wild animals.
Interwoven with Ruth’s personal story, the film will also include sequences about the giant panda and efforts to protect it.  The Chengdu Cultural & Tourism Development Group will finance half the budget and provide unique access to the Panda Preserve at Wolong. Panda-Monium will be directed by Japan Prize winner Jack Silberman.

DOLPHIN DREAMS

A Young boy escapes his parents’ ugly divorce by living in a world of “Dolphin Dreams”
Family
Budget: $7.6 Mil US
Development Partners: An Australian/Canadian Co-production with Global Entertainment Ltd.

As BILLY sets to sea, he imagines a pod of dolphins. Simultaneously, a real dolphin suffers separation from his own pod. While the parallel stories of broken family structures unfold, the dolphin and young boy follow their own course with destiny: To meet each other, and to be reunited with their own loved ones.

Story by: Christopher J. Brough;
Screenplay: Monika Mitchell and Christopher J. Brough
Producers: Christopher J. Brough, Harry Sutherland and Stuart Scowcroft

“Dolphin Dreams” is a story of a young boy who is weathering an ugly divorce between his emotionally immature but devoted father, and his self-absorbed mother. In the separation, his mother gets custody of the boy, and an eighty foot yacht for the summer. As the young boy sets to sea, he imagines a pod of dolphins, one of whom is a young male like himself. Simultaneously, a real dolphin suffers separation from his own pod. While the parallel stories of broken family structures unfold, the dolphin and young boy follow their own course with destiny: To meet each other, and to be reunited with their own loved ones.

NOBODY

In September of 1975, Oliver “Billy” Sipple saved President Gerald Ford from being assassinated.It turned out to be the biggest mistake of his life.

Richard Bell presents the true story of Oliver Sipple, a thirty-two year old Vietnam War veteran, who, on September 22nd 1975, prevented President Gerald Ford from being assassinated.

In the newspaper reports that followed, Sipple was outed as a gay man - a disclosure he never wanted to be made public. Coincidentally, the Ford Administration neglected to give him a commendation, or invite him to the White House. Sipple's friend, the politician Harvey Milk and gay lib groups were enraged that, after what happened to President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, Sipple wasn't considered a hero. When news of Sipple's sexuality reached his parents in rural Michigan, they were shunned by their neighbors, and they never spoke to their son again.

Nobody follows the life of Sipple as he fights to maintain his teetering sanity in the midst of media scrutiny, falling in and out of love, and through the drama of the 15 million dollar invasion of privacy suit he launched against the newspapers that outed him. It also delves playfully into Sipple's rich fantasy life, where he imagines himself not only being thanked by the president, but being welcomed into the life of him and First Lady Betty Ford.

A human love story, a courtroom drama, an ethics investigation, and a bristling American tragedy, Nobody opens a porthole to the turbulent 1970s, and unapologetically brings to the fore issues even more burning today than they were then.

BASE CAMP: MOUNT EVEREST

Directed by: Dianne Whelan
Produced by: Marc Borja

The central character of this feature documentary is the camp itself: the birth, life and death of Base Camp 2008. Over 800 people will hike in accompanied by Yaks, porters and Sherpas to create a tent city for two months while climbers try to reach the world’s highest peak. At 17,600 feet Base Camp is a barren wasteland incapable of sustaining life. Yet, it comes alive each year with a unique selection of people from around the world. Climbers, local Sherpas and others will be interviewed amidst the chaos of Base Camp. Why are they here? What does the journey mean to them?

GETTING TO AMERICA

Producers: Harry Sutherland, Marc Borja, Ray Cuerdo
Director: Gail Harvey
Writer: Donald Martin
A Canada/Australia/Philippines co-production with Eric McCormack, Linda Hamilton and Ed Asner

How far will your dream take you?

One young man in Manila discovers that it is truly all about the journey, and not the destination.

This script is inspired by the true-life experiences of Francisco “Toto” Castelo in Manila, a Filipino on whom the character of Antonio “Toto” Estares is based.

Toto works at Manila’s Peninsula Hotel, and makes one desperate failed attempt after another to obtain a visa to go to the U.S. – so he can help his poor family survive and send his siblings to college. In chasing this dream, he risks all, his friendships and relationships, his job, a significant amount of borrowed money, his dignity, and his heart. To fulfill a dream that began with his late father, whose gambling and alcoholism left the family destitute.

What Toto doesn’t realize is that, in a sense, he has already made it to America.

The hotel is America, populated by the good, the bad, and the ugly that make America. After Toto meets the bad and gets ripped off, he feels all is lost.

Yet it’s one of the good Americans that helps him in a most unexpected way to achieve his dream.

VANILLA MANILA
When you look for your history, you find your future.
Drama
Budget: $3.5 Mil CDN
A young man from a small town in British Columbia yearns for family and finds it in the most unlikely place– the dark, erotic, exotic world of Manila’s Macho Dancers.

Screenplay: Marc Borja and Donald Martin;
Cast: Cesar Montano
Producers: Harry Sutherland, Marc Borja and Ray Cuerdo
Vanilla Manila is the unique coming-of-age story of Hobbes Alexander, barely twenty years old. He is a poser, a pragmatist, and a survivor. Each day that goes by in his young life, the longing to be a part of a family grows deeper inside.

After a clumsy and confusing sexual encounter with Lorraine, his musically- gifted friend with body image issues, Hobbes leaves the picturesque and sleepy town of Sicamous, the only world he knows, to look for his father in the Philippines.

What he finds in the strange, smelly, chaotic, beautiful, and sometimes, dangerous world of Manila is not the fictitious realm that consumed his childhood dreams and imagination. He immediately finds out that his father is dead and the bar he owned is now a boarded-up, decaying rubble. The government shut it down long ago for prostituting under-aged girls.

Things get worse for Hobbes. He gets robbed. With no help from the Canadian Embassy due to his father’s reputation and no money to feed his hunger, Hobbes grows desperate…

William Walsh, a handsome, idealistic, neat-freak Amerasian (Filipino mother and American father) rescues him from hopelessness. He takes Hobbes into his world and teaches him the seductive art of Macho Dancing. What ensues is Hobbes’ struggle within. He must reconcile his values with his sexuality or lose what it is he had come halfway around the world to find: A family.

OUT OF HISTORY

Gay culture through the Ages
Feature Documentary / Director: Harry Sutherland
Budget: $1.5 Mil CDN
A Story about same-sex love in Western Culture from the time of Socrates to the trails of Oscar Wilde.
Written by: Harry Sutherland
Producers: Harry Sutherland and Monika Mitchell

Out of History is an engaging stroll through the history of same-sex love in Europe from Ancient Greece to Oscar Wilde.