Johnnie To's ‘Two Gun Cohen’ leads seven titles in a standalone showcase loaded with top indie genre players sure to trigger deals and excitement at the inaugural Toronto market 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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