by Raghu - SawitriCovid19 impact on Canadian movies
As Canada faces record COVID-19 infection rates and stay-at-home orders, major Hollywood studios and streamers have kept shooting movies and TV series on bubble-wrapped film and TV sets in Toronto, Vancouver and elsewhere countrywide.
“Everyone is on high alert right now,” Johonniuss Chemweno, CEO of New Mexico-based VIP Star Network, which conducts diagnostic testing for Hollywood film cast and crews, including on Canadian soundstages, tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Months-long efforts by Canadian studio operators, producers, unions and guilds to work with top studios to bolster on-set coronavirus safety measures for actors and crews, including testing, have so far paid off. “Ultimately, we don’t want any exposure on set. Everybody has to ensure the safety of the crew, to ensure production keeps going,” Chemweno added.
A lack of COVID-19 insurance has kept many local Canadian film and TV projects from starting production until 2021. But maintaining COVID-secure film sets and locations for Hollywood film and TV projects has kept public health officials and politicians satisfied and allowing leeway to keep cameras rolling during the pandemic even as Canadians brace for more unsettling infection numbers in early 2021.
“Testing is a big part of it. We’re testing much more than we were in the past. We don’t want to bring COVID into our productions,” Chris Bazant, a health and safety advisor at Calgary, Alberta-based PMO Global Services, adds after his western Canadian province posted the most active COVID cases per capita in fall 2020 before being overtaken by Ontario and Quebec.
Hollywood still faces significant hurdles getting into Canada before being allowed to work on local soundstages and locations. The federal government on Dec. 30 said airline passengers will soon have to offer proof via a lab-processed PCR test that they are negative for COVID-19 infection three days before their arrival in Canada