Montreal: Roy Dupuis and Serge Houde are the leads in the intense death-row drama Manners of Dying, director/screenwriter Jeremy Peter Allen's first feature. Allen directed the award-winning dramatic short Requiem contre un plafond and is a former Kodak Best Director Award winner at the Montreal World Film Festival.

Manners of Dying was shot over 20 days through to Sept. 28 on location at Maison Gomin, an abandoned women's prison in Quebec City. It's also the first English-language feature for veteran producer Yves Fortin and Quebec City-based Productions Thalie.

The film is adapted from Booker Prize winner Yann Martel's (Life of Pi) Manners of Dying, published in the 1993 short story collection Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.

Dupuis (The Last Chapter, Les Invasions barbares) plays a prisoner slated to be executed in 12 hours who makes a most unusual request to the prison warden, played by Houde. As the story unfolds, multiple versions of the events and circumstances leading up to the execution are played out.

"We've asked Roy Dupuis to deliver eight different performances leading up to [the death of his character] based on the same character," says Fortier. "And Serge Houde also has to deliver eight different performances, in relation to the prisoner."

Dupuis is the lead in the recently wrapped Gilles Noel feature Jack Paradis (Verseau International/Nanouk Films) and one of the leads in Charles Biname's Quebec box-office champ Seraphin: Un homme et son peche (Cite-Amerique).

Houde, who works out of both Montreal and Vancouver, appears in Tobe Hooper's Taken (DreamWorks), John Woo's Paycheck and Philip Haas' The Lathe of Heaven (A&E).

Supporting cast includes Tony Robinow, Vlasta Vrana, Kevin McCoy, Gregory Hlady and Christopher James Yarwood.

Manners of Dying is budgeted at $1.1 million, with support from SODEC and Telefilm Canada. The distrib is Cinema Libre.

Thalie and Synercom are also shooting three new one-hour doc portraits in the Francophonies d'Amerique collection - Le Quebec et la francophonie nord-americaine from director Luc Bourdon, Francophonie de Floride from Nathalie Martin and Les Quebecois en Californie from director Jean Bourbonnais. Broadcasters are TFO, Reseau de l'Information and Tele-Quebec.

Fortin (Le Marais, Le Ciel sur la tete) is in the late stages of financing on the new Andre Foricer feature Les Etats-Unis d'Albert, a $5-million copro with France and Switzerland slated to shoot in early '04 in Quebec City and Mexico. The distrib is Christal Films Distribution.

Elles etaient cinq shoots

Ghyslaine Cote is shooting her second feature film, Elles etaient cinq, a coproduction between Montreal producers Maxime Remillard of Remstar Productions and Richard Lalonde of Forum Films. The 28-day shoot wraps Oct. 3.

In Elles etaient cinq, from screenwriter Chantal Cadieux (Le Collectionneur), a young woman is haunted by a terrible event from her past in a dramatic exploration of the themes of friendship, rape and its aftermath.