Shaftesbury Develops Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

TORONTO,
November 13: Shaftesbury Films has acquired the rights to the book Bloodletting
& Miraculous Cures, which will
be developed into a TV series.

The
drama series, based on a book written by Vincent Lam, a Toronto-based
emergency-room physician, is being developed for The Movie Network in Canada.

“I’m
thrilled to see that my book has started to take on a life of its own,” said
Lam. The collection of short stories connects the lives of a group of young doctors
as they move through medical school into the real world of emergency medicine.

“We’re always looking for
fresh new characters on which to base a television series,” says Christina
Jennings the chairman of Shaftesbury Films. “We believe we have found this in
Vincent Lam's book which provides us with a fresh take on the medical
profession. His characters of Fitzgerald and Chen are riveting. We are
delighted to be adapting his book, which deservedly won The Giller Prize, and
thrilled that The Movie Network embraced the project and is working with us to
develop the book into a dramatic series.”
“E.R. is a medical drama for
conventional television; Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures is
a medical drama for pay television,” says Michelle Marion, the director of
Canadian independent production at The Movie Network. “The Movie Network is the
perfect home for a series based on Dr. Lam's book—you think you are in
for a journey through the expected world of what you know about doctors and
medicine and instead you are treated to an unexpected, almost metaphoric
journey of doctors dealing with powerful internal conflict and beautiful human
frailty in ways that catch the reader off-guard. We are thrilled to be working
with the talented team at Shaftesbury—with whom we do the highly
successful original series ReGenesis.”