Back in the fall, we were busy trumpeting the wonders of Toronto's 25th International Film Festival, and in particular, an intriguing series of films called Preludes.

As you may recall, Preludes were shorts, shot by a group of Canada's most renowned filmmakers. The gang of the usual suspects (such as Atom Egoyan, Jean Pierre Lefebvre, David Cronenberg, Mike Jones etc) grabbed their cameras and went out and had some fun. Their films were uncensored - with only one caveat - the work had to pertain in some way shape or form to celebrating 25 years of Toronto's film festival history.

The directors weren't the only ones who enjoyed the series. Preludes was a huge success. The films played just before the curtain rose on gala presentations and audiences quite frequently enjoyed the short works as much as many of the big cinematic extravaganzas.

Not all of us were fortunate enough to have made it to any galas (sniff), however now there's cause for great rejoicing since Bell Canada has begun broadcasting the popular Preludes on their High Speed Internet Service. Wow! What caused Ma to get into the cyber movie biz?

Hits, my friends. Tons of internet hits. Bell realized is had a winner on its hands during the festival. Surfers went nuts, flocking to the company's site to catch video and webcast coverage of the festival. Now Bell's hoping to keep up the traffic with the webcast of Preludes.

Just in case you think it's all about dollars and cents, the folks at Bell claim to have a philanthropic agenda as well. "Canada is committed to supporting such extraordinary talent from Canada's finest filmmakers and making their original works available to everyone with high speed Internet access or dial-up Internet access," said Sylvie Lalande, Chief Communications Officer for Bell Canada. "Delivering the festival's Preludes online and making them available on demand makes us proud to be contributing to this convergence of the arts and technology."

If you want to catch Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition's online presentation of the Preludes, they'll be running until July 2001 at:

God Bless us Everyone! We all know that Christmas season is right around the corner when Scrooge starts popping up on the tube in those Canadian Tire commercials. Well tonight the most famous holiday miser in history is making an opening appearance at Halifax's Neptune Theatre.

Writer Warren Graves has taken a crack at Charles Dickens' much beloved classic about the nasty old curmudgeon who sees his past, his present and his future flash before his eyes one dark and stormy winter night.

Scrooge
December 1 to 24, 2000
Neptune Theatre
Halifax, Nova Scotia
(902) 429-7070

Cliff Dwellers: Noted Toronto architecture critic Alfred Holden will give a free lecture and slide show this weekend on Building Apartment Houses. Holden is a downtowner and has been passionate about finding real community in the towers of Toronto. He's spent years collecting pictures and stories about the people who built some of the city's best structures.

"Walk out onto St. George Street from the subway today, and a pleasant, urbane scene unfolds. Glance left and you see the York Club, the most distinguished Richardsonian Romanesque house in Toronto," completed in 1889 for Toronto liquor king George Gooderham, and today sitting on a lush shaded lawn. Kitty-corner across Bloor Street West is Raymond Moriyama's Bata Shoe Museum, its lid-like roof always seeming to be ajar over a building resembling a shoebox. Turn to walk north and you first see more Victorian-era mansions on the west side, dressed well in slate roofs and copper trim. But right away, above and beyond, on both sides of the street, your eye moves to apartment houses, between seven and twenty storeys tall, which continue intermittently up the few long blocks to Dupont Street."

Holden takes tour through the city, as these 20th century "cliff dwellers" attmept to create real social lives in the skyscrapers and towers above Bloor St. Allthough his essay is available online, it should be a fascinating tour in person, with the slide show at work.

Love In: This week on The Passionate Eye, the inside story of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1969 worldwide campaign for peace, which began in Toronto with a much publicized "love-in/bed-in", then just sort of fizzled after that. Find out why in John and Yoko's Year of Peace, Sunday on CBC Newsworld at 10 p.m. ET. Produced by Paul McGrath and narrated by Laurie Brown.