John Friesen
Sprawling tale spanning 50 years in the life of the fictional Linthorne family as seen through the eyes of the rugged head of the clan as he and his wife weather the years of hardship on the prairie after settling on a parcel of untilled Midwestern farmland in 1866 in hopes of living a prosperous life together.
Two small time hoods pretend to be serious henchmen in order to get to do a job in Toronto that they think will get them serious recognition in the mob. Things soon get out of control.
Frank O'Brien, a petty thief, and his 7-year-long girlfriend Roz want to put an end to their unsteady lifestyle and just do that last job, which involves stealing a valuable painting. Frank takes Roz to an island on the coast of New England, where he wants to sell the painting and also hopes that their sagging relationship will get a positive push back up. Not everything goes as planned.
"To Catch a Killer" tells the true gruesome story of John Wayne Gacy - a good friend and helpful neighbour, a great child entertainer, a respectful businessman, and a violent serial killer who raped and murdered over 30 young boys.
Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.
In 1937, a young First Nations (Canadian native) girl named Ashtecome is kidnapped along with several other children from a village as part of a deliberate Canadian policy to force First Nations children to abandon their culture in order to be assimilated into white Canadian/British society. She is taken to a boarding school where she is forced to adopt Western Euro-centric ways and learn English, often under brutal treatment. Only one sympathetic white teacher who is more and more repelled by this bigotry offers her any help from among the staff. That, with her force of will, Ashtecome (forced to take the name Amelia) is determined to hold on to her identity and that of her siblings, who were also abducted.
A Canadian artist turned diamond merchant in Vienna, Austria risks his life to smuggle Jews out of the Third Reich.
Ginny Grainger, a young mother, rediscovers the joy and beauty of Christmas, thanks to the unshakable faith of her six-year-old daughter Abbie and Gideon, Ginny's very own guardian angel.
In this adaptation of the 1977 sci-fi novel, "The Adolescence of P-1," a high school whiz kid's computer program accidentally hooks into the mainframe computer of a nuclear power plant.
Michael Taylor, played by Michael Sarrazin, is tormented by his sheer lack of memory concerning the night his wife was found brutally killed.
It's the winter of 1935 and Max Brown is newly arrived in Willowgreen, Saskatchewan - a rural Canadian prairie town - on his first teaching job in a one room schoolhouse. He quickly realizes that this is not a dream situation: the winter is harsher than he's ever experienced, he's living in the basement of the school, the older of his students treat him poorly and his wages are paltry if and when he ever does get paid.
