COLD LAKE – A television show filmed in the Cold Lake area will be taking inspiration from local ghost stories.
Kinosoo Productions is working on their next project, which is currently unnamed, and will be delving into a paranormal mystery.
“It’s a paranormal detective story,” explained Chris Cowden, writer, director, and producer for the project. “It’s about a detective who’s transferred from the city to a rural area.”
Producer Patty Srisuwan added, “She finds many cases and many things have some mystery and there's a supernatural element to it.”
According to Cowden, he pulled on local urban legends, such as the Fort Kent Windigo, when he was writing this script out.
“She starts out investigating a lot of cold case files and after a while, she figures out that they all have a supernatural element that links them.”
Cowden and Srisuwan have wanted to do a story like this for quite some time, but they never got around to one. It wasn’t until Cowden attended a focus group for Netflix when he decided to take the story off the back burner.
“One of the things that Netflix wanted to emphasize was that they wanted more mysteries and thrillers,” he recalled. “I kind of viewed that as an opportunity to bring up some story ideas that I’ve been working on for a while and that’s kind of the genesis of this project.”
Srisuwan, who will star in the upcoming production, said the local landscape and weather often inspires Cowden and herself to create these kinds of stories.
“As an artist, this place creates so many moods for us that are unique and interesting.”
The shooting locations for this production will mainly be located within the City of Cold Lake and MD of Bonnyville. Srisuwan said this area is a favourite one for Kinosoo Productions to shoot in because “we love it so much.”
Some new areas will be highlighted in this unnamed project, Cowden stated.
“We want to showcase some new things in Cold Lake and some good places to film. Maybe some places people didn’t know about and they haven’t seen these areas. We’ll highlight some new areas.”
Although it wasn’t ever stated, Kinosoo Productions’ movie, Moments in Spacetime, was based and filmed in Cold Lake. The film told the story of Macie, played by Srisuwan, a Thai immigrant that was adopted by a North American family and must look after her dementia suffering grandfather. It was filmed in 2019 and was released in 2020.
This is the second project Kinosoo Productions has worked on so far this year. They also filmed a television pilot for Rebar at the beginning of April, which turned Cold Lake into Soviet-era Russia to tell the story of a former sex traffic victim who comes to seek her revenge on those who wronged her.
The goal is to shoot this new project in August and there will be a chance for a number of extras at that time.
“With Rebar, it was a very specific case that we needed because it was this Russian story, whereas this one there will be many opportunities for extras if people are wanting to get involved in any way,” Cowden noted.
He encouraged anyone interested to reach out to them at [email protected].
