In Development
A Christmas Furey
Feature / Comedy / English
Produced by 2M Innovative
Written by Mary Walsh and Ed Macdonald
“And lo a child came forth and gave light to them that sat in darkness.” And as in the story of the first Christmas a child comes into the world of the Furey’s (of Hatching, Matching & Dispatching fame) and redeems that world and changes it forever.
A Christmas Furey deals with all the joy, sadness and madness that are a part of every holiday season… with extra emphasis on the madness.
The crazy Christmas parties at work, all the sibling rivalry, excessive drinking, the trauma of putting up a tree, holiday meals and drunken Christmas carolling, pregnancies, heart attacks, car smash ups on black ice all added to the daily chaos of providing the ambulance service, funeral parlour and wedding hall to the community of Cat Gut Cove and surrounding areas. On top of that, the Furey’s add a foster child to the mix, a child who spent his life in the system and is used to being neglected, he’s fat, annoying and cant even wipe his own bum, speaks in a fake baby voice and creates mayhem wherever he goes.
The Furey’s survive their Christmas, and learn about the joys a child can bring. But unlike that first Christmas, there’s barely a wise man and not a virgin to be found.
Don't Ask
Series / Factual-Interactive / English
Produced by Rink Rat Productions
Written by Ed Riche
“Don’t Ask” is the public affairs program that does. “Should smokers be denied health care?” “How about the obese?” “As Canadians overwhelmingly prefer to consume mass culture, why should we support indigenous artists?” “Were your RRSPs an elaborate con?”
An introductory essay is followed by documentary elements; the finding of facts needed to tackle the toughest questions going and animate a panel discussion moderated by our provocative host.
The show is totally mobile, completely unchained from the studio. The panels take place in cafes and bars, community centres always in a very public place.
Our host is sceptical, allergic to spin even, sometimes, like our audience a little angry.
How To Be Deadly
Feature / Comedy / English
Produced by Rink Rat Productions Inc.
Written by Nik Sexton and Ed Riche
On the eve of the biggest dirt bike competition of the year, alpha underdog, working class hero and utterly “unique human” Donnie Dumphy cashes his welfare cheque, tours the sketchiest regions of town, loses the love of his life, gets a shit-knocking, puts his “all” into an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, steals hallucinogenic mushrooms from some teens, brings the house down at the hottest club with his raps and sleeps with his social worker.
What else do you wanna know? Oh yeah, he so really wins that dirt bike competition despite what the judges say. Everybody knows dat.
Kild by Severall Accidents
Feature / Documentary / English
Produced by Rink Rat Productions and The National Film Board of Canada
Written by Ed Riche
What is “risk?” When was it first conceptualized by man? When was it first quantified and then commodified? How does the human mind weigh comparative risks and why do we so often get it wrong? What strategies have we imagined to minimize our exposure to risks, from communicable disease to declines in the value of our assets?
“Kild by Severall accidents” is a meditation on “risk” an exploration of the concept and how we perceive and respond (rationally and otherwise) to possible perils and real dangers.
The film takes it title from the category “Kild by Severall accidents” as listed on a table of deaths in London for the year 1665.
Maudie
Feature / Drama / English
Produced by Rink Rat Productions and Screen Door
Directed by Jean-François Pouliot
Written by Sherry White
Maudie is an unlikely love story in which a curmudgeonly miser hires a tiny disfigured woman to be his housekeeper and ends up managing her artistic career as a she becomes a well loved folk artist. Inspired by the life story of Nova Scotia folk artist Maude Lewis.
EVERETT LEWIS (48) is a man who owes nothing to anyone. Tall, skinny and shabby, abandoned by his parents at a very young age, he has nevertheless managed to become a proud and self-sufficient man, largely by collecting scraps and peddling fish. He lives in a 10X12 foot house that has neither running water nor electricity, but at least it’s all his. Everett is his own boss and has everything he needs, except maybe a woman to clean the house and cook his meals. When he posts an ad for a live-in housekeeper, the only interest generated is from a strange looking woman - short, hunched over, with gnarled up hands and two huge bright brown eyes. And her name is MAUDE DOWLEY (32).
Though Everett resists at first, he finally hires Maud. But he is suspicious of her. She talks too much, has too many opinions. She’s a terrible housekeeper and keeps talking marriage whenever he tries to have sex. She spends most of her time painting doodles on cardboard the walls of his house. Everett realizes he hardly got what he bargained for. At least, the little cards that Maud paints begin to sell, so she can start pulling her weight around the house.
But what’s worse is Everett is starting to need Maud. When she isn’t near him, his life is dull and grey. As years pass and Maudie becomes a recognized folk artist, Everett has more difficulty hiding from his feelings. His fears of abandonment rise to the surface and become intolerable whenever he feels at risk of losing her. He has to decide whether he’ll shut down and protect himself from ever being hurt, or if he will take the risk and let love into his life, even if it means his heart will break for doing it.
Without love, there is no purpose
Mending Fences
Series / Factual / English
Produced by Rink Rat Productions
Written by Ed Riche
An original prime time, multi platform reality series, which finds the conflicts between Canadian neighbours that have escalated into all out war and does its best to resolve them.
This show is about the people next door whose kid’s thrash metal band practices into the wee hours, the stench of Kim chi fermenting in the yard or the sausages hung to cure on the clothesline, the fat guy who insists on walking around in nothing but a throng – sometimes the fence can’t be high enough to make good neighbours and there’s trouble.
Sometimes it’s as simple as a dispute over a property line, other times it’s as messy as an unwanted sexual advance at a drunken pool party twelve years ago. Whatever the cause our *host gets in there to settle the matter.
Over the course of 10 hour-long episodes, “Mending Fences” will visit rural and urban neighbourhoods across Canada, showcasing our country’s cultural and geographical diversity while entertaining the audience with real stories of neighbourhood wars that we can all relate to, sympathise with and laugh at.
Our host isn’t above taking sides. Sure he’s a conciliator but sometimes one party is just in the wrong or, in the view of pretty much everyone on the block, a giant asshole and then our host becomes arbiter. The judgement can be harsh but, hey, people gotta live.
Monchy Nine
Pilot / Docu-Drama / English
Co-produced by Hell Creek Entertainment, Rink Rat Productions and M9 Productions
Not a message could be heard from the front. This worried the Commanding officer of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, Lt. Col. Forbes-Robertson. Immediately, he sent forward the signalling officer, Lt. Kevin Keegan. When Lt. Keegan arrived at the front what he say was horrific – not a single Newfoundlander left standing… all either badly wounded or dead. Moreover, five hundred Germans were continuing their advance.
It is what happened next, at 10am on the 14th of April 1917, that truly extols the Regiment’s motto: “Better Than The Best”. Forbes-Robertson collected every man he could from his headquarters staff, armed them with rifles and ammunition from the scores of wounded strewn at the scene, and over the next few hours, nine men held off a massive German attach.
So soon after the slaughter of the Somme, The Battle of Monchy-le-Preux, proved yet another bloody day for the regiment, 166 killed, 141 wounded and 153 captured. Those nine brave men, however, over incredible odds, held the line – essentially saving the day.
Ninety years later, M9 productions return to the now serene village of Monchy-le-Preux with present day members of The Royal Newfoundland Regiment, to rededicate their World War One monument. Included in that group are two soldiers whose family members fought on that fateful day – never to return to their island home. It is through those families, interviews, first-hand accounts and chilling battle scene re-enactments that we retell one of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment’s most incredible honors, the day the none men saved Monchy!
Pillville
Pilot / Comedy / English
Produced by Rink Rat Productions Inc.
Created by Barry Squires and Ed Riche
Written by Ed Riche
What is she on?
Pillville follows the comic misadventures, in work, love and play, of Margie Coffey, a Sales Representative, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, for the Pharmaceutical giant Abraxia.
The Coffey’s have a long association with the prescription and patent medicine biz. Coffey’s Pharmacy downtown is a landmark in downtown St. John’s. It was first operated by Margie’s Grandfather Augustus and then by her father Harvey … until he went off the rails … more about that later. It is currently in the hands of Margie’s overachieving older sister Lynn. It was Lynn that stepped in, straight out of Pharmacy school, to save the family business. She restored the building, leased part of the street frontage to a fancy schmancy Cal-Ital coffee shop and turned the two top floors into doctor’s offices. It’s called The Coffey Medical Centre now. Margie would have done more to help but … well her life was falling apart.
Sales is more Margie’s thing anyway. She couldn’t bear to be stuck behind that counter all day … or to have wasted her youth getting the qualifications. She thrives on being out there, constantly in motion. Margie’s attractive and gregarious. Her office is her always new Mercedes, a blackberry and a choice table at Miquelon, the town’s swishest eatery. It’s not easy that the chef-owner of the restaurant is her ex-, the (see: her “life was falling apart” above) sexy Manny, but the food and atmosphere are the best, just the place to pitch product to tipsy physicians, so it’s a sacrifice Margie is willing to make. She gets the choice tables, at any restaurant in town really, because nobody, but nobody brings them more business than the Pharma crowd. And it’s not just the best tables at the best restaurants that the Drug Reps have access to. They jump queues for medical services (in with the secretaries), get favoured bottles of wine from the Liquor Commission (they are such good customers) and have even been known to dodge the occasional speeding ticket with an offering of samples. It is a $700 Billion a year industry globally. And with 422 million prescriptions written by doctors in Canada in 2006 nobody could really be more connected.
It’s a tight knit community, Margie is in friendly (and more) competition with the Reps from the other Pharmaceutical outfits. There’s high-maintenance, ex-lawyer, germophobic (she has a secret cache of Tamiflu) nymphomaniac (okay, Margie made that up) Julie. There’s the hard-partying, former nurse Dana. There is one-time (a very short time) NHL star Dave whose big heart almost makes up for his cluelessness.
Then there are the Doctors. Four of note have offices in The Coffey Medical Centre. Dr. Fisher is a GP, a soccer mom and quick drunk with a thing for Dave. (If you knew, her husband Frank, an accountant at Hibernia, you’d understand.) There is the always jovial Dr. Sam (Samunthanthunamum) with his wife, two kids, a couple of girlfriends and the biggest Botox clinic in town. Dr. Withers makes known his impeccable British Medical School credentials and after 35 years in the colonies hasn’t lost a bit of that Oxbridge accent. Withers frowns on some of his colleague’s antics and takes pride in not being “compromised” by the Drug Companies. He never accepts the lunches or the cocktails or the bottles of the best vintages at Christmas. Almost never. Withers, a recent widower (Hildy, his lesbian wife, was struck by lightening while golfing), has a thing for Julie. Everybody loves Dr. Schwartz the obstetrician and gynaecologist. He’s nearing retirement and burnt out from years of work (it being St. John’s it is no surprise that he delivered Margie, Lynn, Julie, Dave, Dana and taught both Dr. Sam and Dr. Fisher) he’s starting to slip a bit but everybody loves him and encourages him to put off retirement.
The Reps from the various Big Pharma outfits aren’t really battling with each other as much as they are with their respective head offices, and the “Business Management” automatons they occasionally send to mind their business.
The action takes place against the backdrop of the booming St. John’s, Newfoundland of today. The delicious little city has been leading Canada in growth for nearly a decade now. The high-priced renos and condos, the restaurants and boutique hotels, the hot wheels – evidence of the new found oil wealth is everywhere. But, with it’s mad streets and lanes, it’s late nights, it’s candy-colored row housing, its ancient to the future music scene, its precipitous hills, its mysterious fog it is still more old Europe than the new West. It’s exciting.
Each episode takes, as a point of departure, one of the many pills or products our characters might be pitching. One episode might be “Viagra”, another “Prozac”.
Searching For Peter Kerrivan
Feature / Documentary / English
Produced by Rink Rat Productions
Written by Linda Conway
Drive from St. John’s to Renews, an outport of 375 people, located on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. Look west. Beyond the marshes and forests of stunted spruce, a bold, solitary peak of red and grey stone dominates the landscape. This is the Butterpot, and for residents of Renews, it stands in a place where legend and history meet.
Here, in the high barrens surrounding the mountain is where Peter Kerrivan and The Society of Masterless Men took their chances living in an unknown wilderness, rather than face the squalor and brutality of indentured servitude. Here, in kitchens, and on the wharves of Renews, local residents will point towards the Butterpot, and tell you about the Masterless Men. Some may even mention that they are the descendents of those very outlaws.
However, academics and historians insist that Peter Kerrivan and The Society of Masterless Men never existed—a “mere folktale caught on the wind”—although they will admit the legend certainly reflects the social and economic conditions of fishing plantations on the Southern Shore in eighteenth-century Newfoundland.
But if oral accounts, shared in Renews, fail in offering the explicit detail demanded by historians for establishing an authoritative record, there is no doubt that these stories are profoundly embedded in local landscape and identity. You are listening to a community’s own memory of itself, layered with anecdotes that have been preserved and transmitted for generations.
If story-tellers are sometimes vague on the specific timing of events, they are precise about location—their intimacy “of place” is present and tangible. They don’t ignore the construct of time, but in telling their stories, they operate in a unique temporal plane, neither purely in the past, nor absolutely in the present, but in both simultaneously—thus creating a poetic alchemy of time, and authenticity, that will never exist in the dry data of academia.
Within the stories of Peter Kerrivan and The Society of Masterless Men, lies the DNA of authentic indigenous culture—stories created out of a community’s deep engagement with the landscape in which they reside. Stories that summon forth what the Irish indentify as “duchas”, a word that suggests: “a collective soul; one’s native place; a shared tradition; where one belongs.”
“Searching for Peter Kerrivan” is a meditation on the intangible power of story-telling tradition encountered at the intersection of legend and history. And, how these stories shape identity, form community, and confer meaning to the landscape people consider home.
