So now what?

That’s the question we asked directors, producers and screenwriters with films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The following is a selection of new projects from Vincenzo Natali, Tim Southam, Greg Klymkiw, Kenny Hotz and Spencer Rice, Errol Morris, Kari Skogland, Gary Burns, Michael Moore, Mike Kronish, and Quentin Lee, all of which were pitched to could-be financiers at tiff.

*Skogland’s Last Lovers

Men With Guns director Kari Skogland is in development on the feature film Last Lovers. Hoping to begin production in November, Skogland is looking for development money and financing for the Just Betzer-produced project about a man in Paris dealing with Roman Catholicism, madness and love.

*Natali on the Mutants trail

Described as ‘a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare,’ the containment themes in Vincenzo Natali’s feature debut Cube are to be continued in his next project Mutants.

Natali bills the feature script (cowritten with Toinette Terry) as a love story that picks up where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein left off.

Mutants examines the life of ‘the rock star of scientists’ who is leading the vanguard of genetic manipulators, splicing human dna to form hybrid species. Problems arise when he finds out that sex and science don’t mix as he begins acting out his most repressed desires with a bastardized genetic mutation.

Natali says Mutants will be modestly budgeted, between $5 million to $6 million, with an ‘art direction-heavy’ feel, much like his Canadian Film Centre Feature Film Project-produced Cube. Natali also mentions that Cube star and friend David Hewlett would be perfect for the role of the scientist.

Meanwhile, Cube coproducer Mehra Meh is looking for financing for his next project, Fishface. The Sue Maheux script follows an urban tough girl’s banishment to a coastal Nova Scotia fishing village and her relationship with a mythical sea creature, who is the ghost of an ancient mariner.

*NFB alum pitch

Award-winning director/writer Tim Southam, who screened the National Film Board/Michael Allder produced Drowning In Dreams at this year’s festival, continues to explore themes of obsession and memory with his next script titled Labrador Tea.

Set in a clearcut, Southam says the new script is reminiscent of his 1994 Grammy-nominated, Rhombus Media-produced drama/performance film Satie and Suzanne.

‘Labrador Tea explores the nexus between love and opportunism, and my interest in salespeople,’ says Southam, who is looking for financing and development money for the feature.

Meanwhile, veteran producer Greg Klymkiw, who has Bruno Pacheco’s City of Dark (nfb/October Films) here this year, is looking for finishing money for his feature-length documentary Vinyl, coproduced with Alan Zweig.

Exploring people’s fascination and obsessions with recordings on the quickly disappearing, yet superior-sounding plastic, the film includes appearances from director Guy Maddin, who owns one of the largest 78 collections in Canada, and columnist Geoff Pevere, who reenacts the time he threw out 2,000 records when he was moving.

*Pitching the Dawn

pitch producers Kenny Hotz and Spencer Rice, hoping their new status as festival participants instead of party-crashers would add weight to the much-passed-on tale of a Mafia don who gets an accidental sex-change operation, were still trying to sell their comedy script The Dawn.

Also on deck for Rice and Hotz is their new project 7 Days In The Hole. The pair are working on a completed script.

Overseeing Rice and Hotz was former Miramax exec Joel Roodman, now of New York-based Gotham Entertainment, who acted as a sales agent for Pitch and was looking for a distribution deal. By the end of the week, word on the party circuit was that it would be cut down to an hour for sale to one of the u.s. cable nets, Showtime or hbo.

*Burns shops Banff

Calgary’s Gary Burns (Kitchen Party) pitched Banff (working title), the tale of an agoraphobic man who goes to the mountains to deal with his condition and hires a student to be his companion.

Hoping to shoot the picture next summer out of Calgary on a budget of around $2 million, Burns is seeking development and financial backing.

Kitchen Party was rumored to have caught the interest of representatives from Miramax and October Films although there is no confirmation on a sale as of press time.

*Moore’s next big one

Michael Moore says he gets pitched all the time but maintains that his own story about a prostitute that becomes a nun is the wildest pitch going.

It was at the festival that Moore closed the deal with Miramax for u.s. distribution on The Big One, which chronicles the author’s 1996 media tour to promote his book Downsize This.

Moore spent the summer writing a follow-up to Canadian Bacon. Columbia TriStar, which has a first-look deal with Moore, may produce.

In the meantime, he’s busy working on his new television show Michael Moore’s World, which he says ‘is exactly like TV Nation except it will have a broader worldwide focus.’ The show is a coproduction between Moore’s company Dog Eat Dog and David Mortimer of the bbc, and is distributed by Mayfair Entertainment.

*Morris’ Dr. Death and King Boots

Acclaimed American documentary director Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) was trying to secure funding and distribution for two non-fiction projects while in Toronto with his latest offering, Fast Cheap & Out of Control.

Morris is currently posting the feature Dr. Death about an electric chair repairman and death machine designer. The $2-million picture was shot with funding from Channel 4 in the u.k. and is based on a true story.

Also on his slate is the upcoming Warner Bros. feature The Trial of King Boots. Morris is looking to go into production in the near future on his script that tells the true story of a dog in Detroit, Michigan, that was put on trial for murder.

*TIFF is the Rightime

Mike Kronish and his two-year-old Montreal-based production company Rightime was seeking broadcasters for his just-completed one-hour doc about color barrier-breaking baseball player Jackie Robinson’s year in Montreal before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Jackie Robinson in Montreal: The Challenge, available in French and English versions and broadcast on presold Montreal station Television Quatre Saisons early in September, questions whether the experiment of playing the first black major league ballplayer would have been successful if it had occurred in a different North American city.

‘It’s more of a sociopolitical documentary than a sports film,’ says Kronish, who plans to submit Jackie Robinson to festivals like next year’s Hot Docs! in Toronto.

Kronish has been has been fielding offers from broadcasters. ‘We’re looking for the best first-window English rights Canadian contract,’ says Kronish, who was seen talking to reps from Vision tv, ctv and tfo.

Rightime was also pitching a doc on Montreal squeegee kids, and talking to u.s. distributors looking for presales for the feature The Weeping Fruit, a love story set in the Gaspe region of Quebec.

‘I don’t think we would go ahead with anything anymore without presale money,’ says Kronish.

*Shopping for development $s

Quentin Lee was looking for distribution for his feature film debut Shopping for Fangs, codirected by Justin Lin. The North American rights are being repped by u.s. Producers Rep team Rose Kuo and Melanie Backer.

Lee has been talking to Bill House from Telefilm Canada, Charlotte Mickie from Alliance and a representative from Troika Films about his next project, The Secret Diary of Boys. Set in Vancouver, Lee says the script is a Clueless type of film that chronicles the last year of high school for two Asian-Canadian boys, one of whom is homosexual.

Meanwhile, Lin is pitching his next script, Socio Familia, a black comedy thriller dealing with a dysfunctional family.