From sea to sea: East coast.

As the 20th Atlantic Film Festival looms, the region is still basking in the critical and box-office success of Allan Moyle's New Waterford Girl. This year, however, there are only two small-scale, low-budget indigenous dramatic features lined up. Newfoundlander Rosemary House's Violet and Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman's Parsley Days are both intimate gender comedy / dramas that hope to follow the trail that brought Tricia Fish's fresh and funny script for New Waterford Girl to national and international prominence. Prince Edward Islander Gretha Rose developed a script called Wild Mustard for Thom Fitzgerald (The Hanging Garden, Beefcake) to direct this past summer, but at the last-minute financing fell through, delaying the project until fall or next spring. Meanwhile, some more established filmmakers are tantalizingly close to production or in the final stages of development, including Bill MacGillivray's The Dreams of Jinky Drover and Stephen Reynolds's adaptation of Wayne Johnston's Human Amusements as a follow-up to The Divine Ryans.... Documentaries, on the other hand, are particularly strong this year with Sylvia Hamilton's Think On Me: The Portia White Story, Peter d'Entremont and John Martin's Hank and Jimmy (about Hank Snow and his son Jimmy Rodgers Snow) and Matthew Welsh's Breakaway (about two brain-injured men and their quest for total recovery) leading a strong pack of non-fiction films from the region.... Despite the lack of indigenous features (many local features are stalled as they wait for the promised but long-delayed feature-film funding from the feds), there's still a large amount of service production going on, including American actor Billy Morrisette's 1970s take on Macbeth, starring James Legros and Christopher Walken, entitled Scotland, PA.... Disturbing news from New Brunswick reveals that the big sci-fi TV series Space Hunter has been mired in personnel and financial difficulties highlighted by a dispute with ACTRA because the project is a non-union shoot, a dangerous precedent for a province just getting into the business. But Film New Brunswick, the provincial film-funding agency, doesn't seem phased. Space Hunter rolls along regardless, with a 13-episode commitment from the Space Channel.