Richard Ciupka

Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and are now also sold on DVD. The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, Canada Post Power Broadcasting, and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute. While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.

The Hunger is a British/Canadian television horror anthology series, co-produced by Scott Free Productions, Telescene Film Group Productions and the Canadian pay-TV channel The Movie Network. Though it shares a title with the feature film The Hunger the series has no direct plot or character connection to the film, and was created by Jeff Fazio. Originally shown on the Sci Fi Channel in the UK, The Movie Network in Canada and Showtime in the US, the series was broadcast from 1997 to 2000, and is internally organized into two seasons. Each episode was based around an independent story introduced by the host; Terence Stamp hosted each episode for the first season, and was replaced in the second season by David Bowie. Stories tended to focus on themes of self-destructive desire and obsession, with a strong component of soft-core erotica; popular tropes for the stories included cannibalism, vampires, sex, and poison.

Dressed as a clown, the clever rascal Grimm holds up the most secure bank of Montreal and takes 30 hostages. While confusing and ridiculing the police with his strange behavior, he calmly manages to rid the bank of a fortune. But then an unsatisfied companion arouses trouble...

In a corrupt city, a small-time gangster and the estranged wife of a pot dealer find themselves thrown together in an escapade of love, money, drugs and danger.

Siberia 1953: Ilsa is now working in a Gulag prison camp. Her mission is to "retrain the minds" of those who don't agree with the communists.

The true story about the Canadian cancer amputee hero, who decided to run across Canada on only one leg to raise money for cancer research.

A war vet finds out that a former prostitute had his baby. Doubting it's his, he gives it away, so she reports him. Twenty years later, she still wants to find her son. She meets a young man and falls in love, but the vet's prison term ends.

A backwoods, illiterate young woman from Arkansas battles to regain custody of her son from her estranged husband who feels she is an unfit mother. In the process, she falls in love with a struggling musician who helps her cause.

This is the story about Joy who falls in love with an older man (she has been looking for her missing father all her life), and then travels around Paris with him and his other female companion, experiencing a broad range of sexual encounters.

A Harvard University student finds a strange letter that seems to be signed by George Washington. When trying to contact an expert (Prof. Chandler) to authenticate it, he is murdered but the letter disappears. Then Chandler, who does not know anything about the case, gets chased by the mafia and haunted by a TV reporter (Polly Bishop).

Lindsey Wilson first found love in the romantic city of Paris when she was a university student studying art there. Now, twenty years later, she is returning to the City of Light to take her daughter on an adventure there. With a little inspiration from the city's famed "love locks" on its scenic bridges, the adventure proves to be a journey of romance and rediscovery for the divorced Lindsey when she reconnects with her college flame in Paris and finds that her first love just might be the lasting love of her life after all.

Soviet High School girls are sent to the U.S. where they are taught to become secret agents and use sex to find information.

Six young actresses auditioning for a movie role at a remote mansion are targeted by a mysterious masked murderer.

A tough rich female ranch owner in Africa wants to cut off the water supply to the locals, since she holds them responsible for the murder of her husband. She hires two charming gunrunners as help, but they suspect her shady competitor.

A Montreal police inspector cracks a murder case with clues from the victim's diary.

While waiting in vain for a call from a producer, a young screenwriter sinks into a sort of paranoid delirium. Undoubtedly one of the most striking Quebec experimental films of the 1970s. This work with its expressionist aesthetic has been aptly described as Kafkaesque, the adjective emphasizing the ability of the two filmmakers to evoke anguish and madness, the feeling of confinement and withdrawal into oneself. Important detail: the screenplay written by the character is called The Basement, which is also the title of another Cholakian film made in 1974. (Marcel Jean, Dictionnaire des films québécois)

A Montreal police officer goes to Arkansas to solve the murder of his brother.

A young American hockey player, studying in Canada on a hockey scholarship, falls in love while risking his scholarship and the prospect of the Vietnam war draft.

In Depression-era New England, a miserly businessman named Benedict Slade receives a long-overdue attitude adjustment one Christmas Eve when he is visited by three ghostly figures who resemble three of the people whose possessions Slade had seized to collect on unpaid loans. Assuming the roles of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future from Charles Dickens' classic story, the three apparitions force Slade to face the consequences of his skinflint ways, and he becomes a caring, generous, amiable man.

New York urologist Harold Lear gets a taste of his own medicine when he suffers a heart attack and is confronted with a medical institution which doesn't seem equipped to help. Wife Martha steps in to fight the system and get a measure of service and compassion. Ultimately the greatest battle is not waged against the medical profession, however, but against Lear's own failing body and his own mortal fears.