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With the horrible specter of Covid still hanging over the world, the folks at the Frontières co-production market were a little concerned that their genre submissions would be heavily virus-centric.

However, they needn’t have worried. The lineup for the 2021 market, organized by the Fantasia International Film Festival in collaboration with Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes, features a wildly creative array of projects, including one about a telepathic serial killer cat, another about deportation and a deadly virus which kills white people, and yet another which puts a horrifying twist on the often harrowing experience of coming out.

“I am very happy that our lineup is not about Covid,” says Frontières executive director Annick Mahnert. “We did have a couple submissions on that theme, but overall people said no, we don’t have to write about this. It’s happening in real life, but we’ll find something else to talk about.

The big winners during the body’s latest round of funding were the drama series The Life and Laura H., as well as Saskia Diesing and Ben Verbong’s new fiction features. During the first round of the 2021 Netherlands Film Production Incentive, contributions were made to 21 new productions, for a total of €5.9 million. The new supported projects include 12 fiction features, five documentary features, two drama series and two documentary series, including nine international co-productions. These contributions are set to generate over €24 million in production expenditure in the Netherlands. The grant of the biggest magnitude was bestowed upon Giancarlo Sanchez’s 8x50 drama series The Life, staged by Topkapi TV, and penned by Chris Westendorp, Ashar Medina and Wander Theunis. The other drama series awarded funding was Mustafa Duygulu’s 6x45-50 Laura H., produced by De Familie and Belgium’s Mockingbird Productions. Meanwhile, the two non-fiction series in receipt...