Three feature film pitches from B.C. are among the five finalists in the nationwide CineCoup “film accelerator program.”
CineCoup will pick one of the pitches to get $1 million and go into production this summer. The finished film will get a nationwide release at the Cineplex theatre chain, a sponsor of the contest.
Some 90 pitches from across Canada have been competing through various challenges since last fall. The last test for the top five teams is a trip to the Banff World Media Festival June 10 to pitch their projects in front of an audience of hundreds and a panel of industry experts including Cineplex’s Michael Kennedy and producer Robert Lantos. Later that day, CineCoup will announce the winner.
The B.C. finalists are:
Alien Abduction, from filmmaker brothers Matt and Mike Granger, a sci-fi comedy starring Patrick Gilmore as a slacker who turns the tables and abducts the alien (Peter New) who has been experimenting on him for years.
BAD, writer-director Jeff Cassidy’s action drama about a fugitive brother and sister (Matty Finochio and Avery Konrad) on a crime spree, with a very polished trailer featuring Tyler Labine as a drug dealer.
Grade Nine, from writer-director Jay Rathore, set in a 1989 high school among a group of friends obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons.
From Alberta comes writer-director Akash Sherman’s apocalyptic sci-fi drama Uprising, whose trailer has some nifty CG effects to set up a story about a battle between the high-tech rich and the low-tech poor.
Saskatchewan writer-director Lowell Dean’s Wolfcop is a horror comedy billed as “Dirty Harry, only hairier”, about a small town cop who goes werewolf after stumbling on a coven of Satanists. Gotta love the clip of the werewolf driving a cop car with his head out the window, doggie style.
Trailers for all the pitches can be viewed here.
