April 1st , 2009
Carole Ducharme's comedy “Ben Voyons Camille! ” wins the Best Short Film Award at the Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto
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Carole Ducharme's comedy “Le Donneur” ( Vancouver ) selected for the first stage of Telefilm Canada 's Écrire au Long program
As part of its Écrire au Long program, an initiative of the Official Languages Activities (OLA) program , Telefilm Canada's French Operations and Quebec Office is pleased to announce that 10 projects – five from outside Quebec and five from outside Montreal – have been selected to participate in Stage 1 – Pre-development. This first stage of the Écrire au long program consists of a writing workshop for the selected writers, a market immersion and training in fiction feature films for producers working in French outside Quebec or outside Montreal . The training will be given in Montreal by the Institut national de l'image et du son (INIS) from November 5 to 9, 2007.
Launched in December 2006, Écrire au long is intended to develop market-driven French-language feature film projects and to encourage creation in French in the regions. The 10 projects selected for Stage 1 are notable for their originality and creativity and highlight the diversity of creators in the various French-speaking regions of Canada .
Telefilm Canada is a federal cultural agency dedicated to the development and promotion of the Canadian audiovisual industry. Telefilm provides financial support to the private sector to create distinctively Canadian productions that appeal to domestic and international audiences. The Corporation also administers the funding programs of the Canadian Television Fund.
Telefilm News Release - 2006-2007 IPOLC competition
Carole Ducharme's short drama Ben Voyons, Camille! to be made for televisionTelefilm Canada , Radio-Canada and the National Film Board of Canada are pleased to announce the winners of the 2006-2007 IPOLC competition (Interdepartmental Partnership with Official-Language Communities) for short dramas to be produced for television: Ben Voyons, Camille ! by Carole Ducharme and La Voisine by Pamela Gallant.
Now in its third year, the competition operates under the Department of Canadian Heritage's Interdepartmental Partnership with Official-Language Communities. It is designed to give Francophone producers, screenwriters and directors working outside Quebec the opportunity to develop TV drama production skills, and to expand the pool of Francophone creators in provinces other than Quebec .
This year the jury of Telefilm Canada , Radio-Canada and NFB representatives chose from among four projects meeting the selection criteria, all of them by talented French-speaking newcomers.
Ben voyons, Camille ! , writer-director Carole Ducharme (Vancouver, British Columbia), Witness Productions/Les Productions Rivard (Vancouver, British Columbia/Winnipeg, Manitoba)
Ben voyons, Camille ! is a black comedy about body image and puberty. To avoid being teased by her family, 13-year-old Camille goes to great lengths to hide from her alcoholic father and her obsessive-compulsive mother the fact that she has started to menstruate. Unfortunately, the thing she fears most - attracting attention - is likely to be what she gets.
Like the four shorts from the earlier competitions these two new dramas will be broadcast on the Radio-Canada network. Telefilm Canada will provide investment, and the National Film Board of Canada will act as associate producer. The contributions of these agencies will be matched in cash by the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Carole Ducharme's TV project selected at Telefilm's IPOLC
Telefilm Canada, Radio-Canada and the National Film Board of Canada in cooperation with the Institut national de l'image et du son (INIS) has launched 2006 IPOLC, a competition for the production of two short TV dramas from Francophone writers living outside Quebec.
Carole Ducharme's dark comedy Ben Voyons, Camille!, has been selected as one of the 8 finalists and will receive a grant to write a first draft screenplay. Born in Montreal and now based in Vancouver , Carole Ducharme is an award-winning writer, director and producer. She is currently writing a feature-length documentary produced by the NFB, and assembling production financing for her feature film The Women of My Life.
The Women of My Life in Hollywood
Carole Ducharme's feature film screenplay Les Femmes de Ma Vie / The Women of My Life has been selected as a finalist at the Moondance International Film Festival 2006 Screenplay Competition, which takes place June 9-11, 2006 at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. The Moondance International Film Festival, popularly known as the "American Cannes", is one of the premier venues for the exhibition and promotion of feature and short films in the US, and one of the leading indie film festivals in the world. Dedicated to celebrating and sharing with international audiences the absolute best in the world of films and screenplays.
The Women of My Life / Les Femmes de ma Vie is the story of a seven-year old girl who believes she was born a fish, and takes refuge in a world of fantasy and soap opera romance in order to escape her parents' disintegrating marriage, amidst the escalating Anglo/Franco tensions in 1970 Quebec.
The screenplay was developed with the assistance of Telefilm Canada , BC Film, The Harold Greenberg Fund, Movie Central, The National Screen Institute Features First.
Moondance International Film Festival screenplay review:
There are a hundred small things that add sparkle to this script (…) The Women of My Life stands on its own as a well crafted script.
The characters are vivid, yet there is also a subtleness to their presentation. (…) It is these very subtleties that add to the richness of the characters. These are not simple people.
The backdrop of the political conflict over Quebec, which spills out into the streets and infiltrates even the play of children, seems to create a symbolic setting for the conflict between Anna and Pierre. It certainly puts the story into a historical context. The popular music from the 60's and 70's adds mood and authenticity to the setting also; it's a nice touch.
The dialogue is well written. The characters sound natural, even the children. Writing children's dialogue can be difficult; they often sound stilted or unnaturally precocious. But here Marysol and Cindy sound like normal seven-year-olds. (….)
All in all, The Women of My Life / Les Femmes de Ma Vie is a very well written script; the characters are complex and appealing, the dialogue is well done, and the setting adds to the nostalgia of the story. It has a wistful quality not unlike Mermaids (with Cher and Danny Devito), which is set in a similar time period. It would seem to be very marketable for the big screen.
The women in the director's chair workshop
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Montreal Mirror
The short stuff / Les 10 Jours 100 Courts, celebrates non-feature length filmmaking
By Matthew Hayes
Straight From the Suburbs, Carole Ducharme's 24-minute short, has done the fest rounds but is worth catching once more. Her striking, cartoonish art direction, coupled with a campy acting style make this turning of the tables all the more rich. Done in the style of an old Doris Day movie, Ducharme has a young straight couple face the horrors of life in a gay world.
Montreal Mirror
By Matthew Hayes
Screening Thursday, January 28 to Sunday the 31st at the Cinémathèque are two locally made films which certainly warrant a night out. (…) Following that will be Straight From the Suburbs , a faux doc about a young woman coming of age in a gay suburb who realizes she might just be (gasp!) heterosexual. The role reversal thing is rather obvious, but filmmaker Carole Ducharme does manage to muster up quite a few laughs with this camp-fest. Straight From the Suburbs was a hit at both the Vancouver and Montreal gay and lesbian film fests.
