By Variety | Created at 2026-08-14 19:49:00 | Updated at 2026-08-14 23:09:24
6 hours ago
Hong Kong film luminary Johnnie To’s “Two Gun Cohen,” based on an extraordinary true story, is among seven titles bowing in Frontières at TIFF: The Market, a standalone showcase aimed at co-producers, sales agents and buyers prospecting genre projects in Toronto this September.
Frontières, the international co-production market organized by Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival, announced its latest spin-off edition in May and received more than 100 submissions for five slots. “The quality was exceptional,” Fantasia deputy director Tania Morissette told Variety. “That made the selection process difficult and ultimately we had to increase the amount of projects.”
“Two Gun” producer Todd Brown, XYZ’s former head of international acquisitions, is perhaps the best known name in the tight, impressive roster of experienced independent genre players and notable emerging talent. He told Variety the team behind his new project aims to “create a ‘dim sum western’ that fuses the eastern and western elements of the story into something bold and unique.”
Indeed, high concept world-building and twists on genre archetypes are notable hallmarks of the Toronto showcase titles, which cut deep into edgy untold stories and contemporary angst around identity.
“Ringing the Changes,” a psychological horror about honeymooners who hear bells in a deserted town, is based on the story of the same name by U.K. cult author Robert Aickman (1914-1981) and helmed by U.K. indie filmmaker Felix Dembinski (“Letters to the Postman”). Film curator and producer Peter Kuplowsky (“In a Violent Nature”) is behind the title under his newly minted Low Sky Productions and alongside L.A.-based producer Ethan Harari of Atlas Artists and executive producer Jessy Kehra.
Fantasy dramedy “Fin” from writer-director Lowell Dean (Sitges Midnight X-Treme Audience Award-winner “Die Alone”) is produced through his Lolofilm Productions with fellow Saskatchewan producers Danielle Masters and Mark Montague. Currently in development, the film revolves around three estranged siblings who reunite at their father’s deathbed and learn their wheelchair-bound, catatonic mother is actually a mermaid.
Frontières alums-turned-mentors Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall (“Lucid”) have wrangled a crack producer team – including Paul Cadieux (Megafun Productions), Isabelle Legault (Filmoption International), Nicola Pender (Pender PR), Paul Peter Phok (Phok Productions) and Krista Rand (Yellowheart Pictures) – to work alongside their Victoria-based Sublunar Films on a surreal folk horror about a lost French-Canadian backpacker who joins a femme cult that worships a mysterious being who lives in a mason jar.
For its first scripted drama, the dark comedy “Wolf of the North,” documentary stalwart 90th Parallel Productions has partnered with Beyond the Frame, a production company with experience in visuals effects and connections in Northern Ontario. Director Jerome Sable, known for horror musical comedies, is co-writing the mockumentary screenplay with Pat Thornton, who also plays the main character, nepo baby Farley Pruitt Jr., an obsessive but inept wildlife star-wannabe whose father was eaten by wolves 30 years ago while making a film about them.
On the international front, director and writer Ran Jing, whose debut feature “Model” won the Emerging Director Award at the 2020 Asian American International Film Festival and was released widely across China, is financing the development of her psychological body horror film “Felt” through her production company Black Rhino Films. In Toronto, she’s seeking a lead production company and Canadian co-production partners.
Brazilian director Matias Mariani’s sci-fi family drama “Nature Boy,” in which a São Paulo school principal forms a reality-bending bond with a boy no one can identify and who speaks no known language, was recently announced as one of 15 projects in San Sebastián’s 2026 Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum. Mariani, director of Berln standout “Shine Your Eyes,” is also producing the film through his Primo Filmes with Lucas Arruda and Tataina Leite’s Bubbles Project, Mariani co-writes the screenplay with Maíra Bühler.
Here is a closer look at the seven Frontières titles at TIFF: The Market.
“Felt” (Ran Jing, U.S.)
Ran Jing has been building support for “Felt” in 2026 through industry programs and screenplay competitions and recently won the LA Crime & Horror Film Festival Screenplay Competition. The story of a felt sculptor who makes a horned, pregnant wool creature after her husband forces her to terminate a pregnancy, has “no blood, no gore—the medium is the terror,” says Jing. “Rooted in the East Asian belief that an object saturated with intense human emotion can develop a will of its own, her sculpture becomes the living embodiment of her repressed rage.”
“Fin” (Lowell Dean, Canada)
Lowell Dean has written and directed a zombie thriller, the “WolfCop” horror comedies, and post-apocalypse action films but his new project feels closer to home. “I’m always drawn to stories that use genre to explore something deeply human,” he says. “’Fin’ combines my personal family experience with a high-concept hook: three adult siblings discover their dying mother is secretly a mermaid, stranded in the middle of the prairies. Through humor, heart, and fantasy, the film explores aging, loss and the difficult process of letting go.”
“Nature Boy” (“O Estranho Menino,” Matias Mariani, Brazil)
Mariani has taken “Nature Boy” to the Cine Qua Non Lab Retreat and the Franco-Brazilian Scriptwriting Lab, contributing to the screenplay development and project strategy. The tale of a school principal who forms a bond with an otherworldly boy draws from his own insights. “What would it be like to be the father of an alien?” Mariani asks. “I have two kids, and the question was born from the anguish of never fully understanding them.”
“Ringing the Changes” (Felix Dembinski, UK, Canada)
A honeymoon turns into a night of terror when the newlyweds learn that ringing church bells herald an annual ritual to raise the dead. The screenplay, co-written by Dembinski and Ross Sutherland (creator of the award-winning U.K. experimental audio-fiction podcast “Imaginary Advice”), is adapted from one of Robert Aickman’s “strange stories.” It conveys a folkloric essence that “spirals into existential terror,” says producer Peter Kuplowsky. “The script is haunting, harrowing and with a dash of incisively good, if macabre, humor.”
“The Pageant” (Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall, Canada)
In their 2025 Fantasia-premiering feature “Lucid,” the filmmakers explored the impact of artistic drive and memory; their new project explores how self discovery can be disorienting and violent. “We framed the story around a rite of passage, a young Quebec backpacker’s pull to go West, to find herself,” says co-director Deanna Milligan. “But when she meets her God, she realizes the thing that accepts you may not be saving you but consuming you.”
“Two Gun Cohen” (Johnnie To, Canada)
Producer Todd Brown had searched for a project that would allow him to bring Johnnie To to Canada, and when he heard the story of Morris “Two Gun” Cohen, he knew he’d found it. The team includes producer Chris Yurkovich (“Slash/Back”), EP Michael Solomon, and writer Patrick Whistler (“In Cold Light”). “This true story of a perpetual grifter living in the Canadian prairies who became personal bodyguard, trusted confidant and general to Dr Sun Yat Sen is so outlandish that nobody would believe it if you made it up,” Brown says.
“Wolf of the North” (Jerome Sable, Canada)
Produced by 90th Parallel’s Stuart Henderson and Javiera Quintana and Beyond The Frame’s Andrew Bronfman, and propelled by Ontario Creates development funding and Telefilm production funding, Jerome Sable’s mockumentary follows Farley Jr. (Pat Thornton) as he travels north with a film crews to try and finish his father’s wolf film. “We are setting out to make a true Canadian Comedy where both C’s are capitalized,” Sable and Thornton say. “A movie that is dripping with Canadian-ness: set in the far north, in the woods, in the winter, with a wolf. ‘Why are they doing this? is the main feeling we will capture.”
TIFF: The Market takes place over Sept. 10-16. Registration is now open.
