TIFFCOM Partners With Frontières for Genre Film Market — SkimNews
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- TIFFCOM's Tokyo Gap-Financing Market announced its first-ever partnership with Frontières, the genre-focused co-production market run by Canada's Fantasia International Film Festival, injecting horror and thriller titles into the seventh TGFM lineup.
- The 24 selected feature projects come from 24 countries across Asia, Europe, South America and North America, each required to have at least 60% of its budget secured and to include an Asian element.
- Frontières' debut Asian showcase comprises five projects, including Brazilian director Gabriela Amaral Almeida's body horror film and Vietnamese director Diep Nguyen Hoang's "The Saddest Stories on Earth," his second consecutive TGFM appearance.
- Imagica Group joins TGFM for the first time to host an open pitch event Oct. 28, with 10 of the 24 projects—including all five Frontières selections—pitching publicly.
- Animation accounts for five of the 24 projects, including an omnibus horror title from the team behind "The Violinist," this year's Annecy Cristal Award winner, and "Back to Tomioka," adapted from a French graphic novel about the Fukushima nuclear accident.
- Japan produces 12 of the 24 selected projects (eight originating locally), featuring Matsumoto Yuaku ("Winny"), Yamamoto Hideo, and Sakabe Takafumi among the directors.
- Cinecittà's Italian collaboration with TGFM enters its third year since 2024, contributing three projects including Italian-Japanese co-productions like Uchiyama Takuya's "The Blue Breaks."
Why it matters: The Frontières tie-up gives Asian genre filmmakers a direct conduit into North American genre financing while TIFFCOM hedges its bets with parallel pipelines—public pitches via the new Imagica open session and the continuing Italian co-production track via Cinecittà. With 10 of 24 projects pitching live to a room of buyers, the market is reshaping itself from closed-door gap financing into a partially transparent marketplace ahead of its Oct. 28-30 run.
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