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The Phantom Skater
Genre(s): Drama
Logline:
A burned-out hockey scout follows rumors of a hot skating sensation called the Phantom Skater to a remote northern lake where he runs into his ex-wife who runs the only B & B in town.
Synopsis:
Bobby, a bitter hockey scout, is sent up North on a wild goose chase to find the world's fastest skater -- a phantom only glimpsed from a distance racing across a great frozen lake. When he arrives in a village full of comic eccentrics, Bobby checks in to the only hotel in town. Unfortunately the place is run by his ex-wife, still angry at the way their marriage ended.
Things go from bad to worse when Bobby discovers his ex is sleeping with the competition, a smooth-talking scout from Florida who's never even played the game. And the Phantom Skater everyone is talking about seems to be a ruse invented by the villagers to swindle the yokels from the South.
Out in the middle of the giant lake, under a starry sky, Bobby finally catches up to the elusive skater. The Phantom challenges him to a game of one-on-one -- and teaches him what life is really all about.
Author Info:
AARON BUSHKOWSKY writes plays, fiction, and poetry as well as screenplays. His work has received numerous nominations and awards, including nominations for B.C. Book Awards and double finals in Theatre B.C.'s Canadian National Playwriting Competition. He was a Screenwriting Resident at the Canadian Film Centre in 1995, and prior to this participated in the Film Centre's Television Workshop. He has another feature film script and a children's TV series in development.
AARON BUSHKOWSKY, Writer
(604) 872-5001
aaronbushkowsky@telus.net
The Pooja Project
Genre: drama
Logline: A good intentioned Canadian woman persuades a beautiful rural Indian girl to come to Canada with the promise of a better life and faces a reversal of fate and fortune.
Synopsis: In the lush sweltering landscape of India a friendship forms between Linda and Pooja, a local village beauty she hires to take care of her baby. Destitute and orphaned, 15 year old Pooja leans on Linda to help arrange her marriage. Instead Linda, with misguided Western enthusiasm and good intentions, tries to liberate Pooja into a love match. Soon dating, mango sex and blue jeans lead to Pooja’s final ostracism from her village and into the arms of an Internet marriage proposal. In Toronto Pooja becomes imprisoned in a new kind of poverty with an abusive husband in a cold white city. Miserable, she seeks Linda's help again. But Linda’s hit the low point of her life and flees the mess she created, and the Western myths she once sold to Pooja begin to mock the messenger. In a reversal of fate and fortune, Linda loses everything and needs Pooja, desperate to learn the secrets of Pooja’s inner strength and endurance. But Pooja’s trust in Linda is thin and it will take a sacrifice to overcome the wall of misunderstandings that once divided them.
Bio: L.A. Tomin was part of an avant-garde art scene of post-wall Berlin in the early 90s, working in both film and music after her film studies at The London International Film School in England. Tomin, who began in film writing and directing shorts on 16mm (The Royal Revelation of Carmelite, Alternative Beginnings, Daddy Had a Red Devil and music video, “The Ace of Spades” on rotation at MTV Europe) chose writing as her primary focus and optioned her first screenplay, Deliah’s Light with Opal Film GmbH in 1997.
In 1999 Tomin took writing to a more formal level when she joined The University of Toronto and completed a specialist degree in English Literature in 2003. Still, she maintained contact with the film industry with agent representation for a second screenplay—Hotline.
After her degree Tomin left Toronto, the city of her birth, and settled in Maharashtra, India for 3 years with her family. India, a land of extremes, was a rich background for new experiences and alternative perspectives. In India Tomin completed another feature length screenplay, Leviathan, and commenced writing The Pooja Project as a novel.
The Pooja Project was transposed and completed as a screenplay in 2008. L.A. Tomin resides with her family on Vancouver Island.
Laurie Anne Tomin, writer
latomin@gmail.com
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Prince of Never Say Never, The
Genre(s): Children's, Action/Adventure
Logline:
A young boy is kidnapped and taken to a bizarre magical kingdom where he’s forced to befriend its tyrannical teenage ruler.
Synopsis:
Ed is twelve years old, and his life is spinning out of control. With his parents heading for divorce court, and his brother and sister openly hating him, Ed runs away only to find himself kidnapped by two misshapen creatures who take him back to the magical kingdom of Never Say Never.
Never Say Never is a land ruled over by a teenage Prince, a physically grotesque young man who, with the help of some magic ‘jawbreakers’, is in complete control of the kingdom. These candies allow the “sucker” to have anything they want. Ed is offered a place of honor and absolute power if he will do just one thing - be the Prince’s friend.
Ed is enthralled with his new home: using magic guns to shoot bullies in a schoolyard, playing with remote controlled people, being waited on hand and foot. It’s all very exciting until spies from the Prince’s arch enemies, “The Tricksters” reveal to Ed what lies beneath the veneer of magic, a Kingdom full of misery and paralyzed by the Prince’s childish whims.
In a daring escape, Ed leaves Never Say Never and seeks refuge with the Trickster King, a kindly old man who rules over an army of mechanical illusions and protects other children from Ed’s world who also escaped the Prince’s “friendship.”
Ed’s betrayal sends the Prince into a homicidal rage; he orders his deadly Skeleton Army to invade the Trickster kingdom and destroy everyone there. By a twist of fate, Ed finds himself in the terrifying position of being the only person who can actually stop the Prince. In a dramatic showdown, Ed battles the Prince for the last remaining jawbreaker. Ed is victorious and restores the kingdom to its rightful rulers, the Prince’s parents. Offered a home and place of honor in Never Say Never, Ed realizes it’s time to return to his own home and start to face the challenges there.
Author Info: ROB THOMPSON has been writing, directing and producing film and video projects for over fifteen years. As a founding member of the award winning company Winter Films he has worked on a wide variety of projects. Two of his best known productions include, Wire, an event where he offered two people $5,000 to live in a chicken cage for one week, and Journey to Little Rock, a documentary that looks at the life of Minnie Jean Brown, one of the famous Little Rock Nine.
ROB THOMPSON, Writer
winter@cyberus.ca
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Pyramids of Marathon, The
Genre(s): Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Romance
Logline:
The Pyramids of Marathon combines romantic comedy with the spike of a thriller — a contemporary road movie with a menacing stop-over in a one-industry town that forever bonds two stranded travelers.
Synopsis:
The Pyramids of Marathon is a romantic comedy that turns deadly serious. The journey follows the Trans-Canada highway around the autumn curves of Lake Superior to the small Franco-Ontario community of Marathon.
George (Georgina), an artistic thirty-year old, on the mend from a broken heart, is driving home to Winnipeg. She is a passionate photographer, in love with abstract black and white imagery. Lately though, the images in her photographs seem more real than her life.
Traveling the same road, is the dangerously charming Franco, a former biker trying to go straight. Nineteen, he is a sleek leathered rider with an open smile and seemingly no particular destination.
The Trans-Canada Highway washes out and, stranded, George and Franco find themselves sharing the last hotel room in Marathon. It is a one-industry mill town totally dependent on the marketplace, and things have been collapsing for quite some time. Fewer loggers are employed, the fate of the mill is in question and now, a vocal contingent of environmental protesters has arrived, accompanied by the flash and scrutiny of the media. The last thing Marathon needs is more bad news.
With a questionable future, the Town struggles to find a solution to Marathon's slow demise. Led by their mayor, a former hockey hero, Eugene, they will do almost anything to keep their town on the map — maybe even murder — and George and Franco have driven right into their midst.
Author Info:
MICHAELIN McDERMOTT is an independent producer/writer/director. She spent three years as a Service Producer for the Discovery Channel and a decade as a stills photographer on various features, mows and television series. Michaelin has produced and directed a rock video, two half-hour dramas and work-shopped two of her short screenplays. She is presently writing the action-adventure feature The End of Later
MICHAELIN McDERMOTT, Writer
(604) 687-5702
mikenpaul@telus.net
Pearl’s Cut & Curl
Logline: A hot hick chick hell bent on self-destruction finds love and a reason for living with the help of her dead hairdresser whore of a grandmother.
Synopsis: Almost every isolated, small community has a hairdresser and a whore. In the town where Iris was raised her grandmother, Pearl, was both.
The scissor wielding, cussing, drinking, floozy raised two orphaned granddaughters with two guiding principles: always have a skill to fall back on, and never trust an enemy (primarily the matriarch of the town’s wealthy, religious Blackburn family.)
With only these pearls of wisdom, Iris escaped to the big City, but things don’t go well. The uppity urban folk are unappreciative of her styling technique and she’s reluctant to rely on the other, more tawdry, fall back skill.
When Iris is summoned to Pearl’s deathbed, she, and her titillated new boyfriend, hatch a hair-brained, pot-induced scheme to expose the elderly Blackburn patriarch as her father and lay claim to an inheritance richer than Pearl provide.
The futile plan bombs. The paternity test is negative. Pearl dies, and
her deliciously lewd ghost returns to torment Iris.
Pearl’s apparition revels in roasting her family (a suicidal sister, a long lost uncle, his new age German wife and their teenage son) as they gather to mourn.
Meanwhile, a vicious winter storm ravages the town, and the family does what all good white trash families do when they reunite; get stinking drunk. An ugly fight erupts, culminating in a revelation: the devastating truth about Iris’s real father.
Haunted, humiliated, and pregnant Iris returns to the city with her only inheritance, Pearl’s diaries. Alone, but for the company of the diaries and Pearl’s annoying spirit, she discovers an altogether different Pearl, an unexpected wisdom, and, perhaps, a means to liking herself.
Bio: Carleen Kyle produced and directed the documentary Heavy Heart Laughs about her experience recovering from grief and trauma by learning stand-up comedy. This project led her to produce and perform in A Comic Concern, a stand-up comedy revue and successful fundraiser for the Vancouver Food Bank.
Her feature script Pearl’s Cut & Curl won a Praxis fellowship and was selected to represent Canada for the prestigious Hartley Merrill International Screen Writing Prize where it received Honorable Mention.
She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from University of Regina, where she won the Saskatchewan Showcase Award for Best Student Film two years running. Among other projects she directed the TV pilot Scrounger which was nominated for the Best Short Drama Gemini and won the Saskatchewan Showcase Award as Best Drama. She also has many years experience working as an assistant director and location manager on film and television productions.
Carleen Kyle, writer
carleenie@yahoo.com
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