Gender Equity in Media Society (GEMS) recently announced the five films selected for 2024 The Genre Film Lab. The Genre Film Lab (formerly known as From Our Dark Side) is an accelerator program designed to support the development of Canadian genre film creators whose projects are at an advanced stage of development. Genre projects include, but are not limited to: thrillers, western, science fiction, fantasy, and horror – or any imaginative combination of these. The teams include writers, directors, and producers selected based on the submission of their original narrative feature film concepts.
The five films this year include projects from British Columbia and Ontario. The projects are: Disco’s Not Dead directed by Panta Mosleh and written by Toby Marks, Dormant written and directed by Jenny Lee-Gilmore, آنجا در آغوشم بکش / Love Me There written by Sara Caspian and co-directed by Caspian and Zehra Nawab, Terrible Thing written and directed by Mily Mumford, and To The Sea written and directed by Vanessa Magic.
This year’s projects were evaluated and selected by a jury of filmmakers and genre industry experts including Austin-based acquisitions manager, programmer, professor, and producer Logan Taylor, Canadian Screen Award-nominated director, writer, and actor Mary Galloway (The Cowichan Sweater: Our Knitted Legacy) from the Cowichan nation, and Elizabeth Purchell, a Brooklyn-based queer film historian, programmer, and filmmaker. Leading the 2024 Genre Film Lab, for the third year, is filmmaker, performer, programmer and former Programming Director for Frontières International co-pro market, Vanessa Meyer.
Discussing the initiative Meyer shared, “As I head into my third year with The Genre Film Lab, I am incredibly proud to be welcoming in such an exciting and strong lineup of projects from emerging Canadian female and gender diverse genre filmmakers. It is such an honor to help grow this creative and powerful community of filmmakers and genre industry professionals, and it is even more amazing to see the amount and quality of our submissions continue to increase year by year. Along with the GEMS team, I am looking forward to introducing our 2024 finalists and their dynamic new projects to the international genre film market. As always, the goal of this program is to support the development of underrepresented voices, and to foster a community through which these voices may prosper and be heard.”
The Genre Film Lab program has expanded this year, beginning a month earlier in May, with not one but two masterclasses on story development and pitching, instructed by the award-winning producer and coach Helene Granqvist (former president of Women in Film and Television International) and culminates with a dedicated pitch session at the Frontières International Co-Production Market (July 24-27, 2024). The sessions will include group development & pitch masterclasses, a Film Sales & Distribution seminar (new this year!), three strategy sessions with genre industry experts focusing on financing and packaging, one-on-one pitch development sessions, individualized consultancies, and a practice pitch session with a group of genre industry professionals.
The Genre Film Lab 2024 is proudly supported by Telefilm Canada and Frontières Market. Past funders include Creative BC, and the Lab was sponsored by Warner Bros Discovery Access Canada in 2023.
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