David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds and R.T. Thorne’s 40 Acres are among the feature-length films to receive funding from Telefilm Canada’s Big Budget stream of its Production Program.

The Crown corporation announced that a total of $16.08 million will be spread among nine English-language films. Out of the nine, five are Ontario films, three are inter-provincial productions, and one is from British Columbia.

The Ontario films include Cronenberg’s Canada/France drama The Shrouds, which is produced by Plausible Communications and France’s SBS Productions, with Montreal and Toronto’s Sphere Films as the distributor; Thorne’s thriller 40 Acres, which he wrote alongside screenwriter Glenn Taylor and is produced by Toronto’s 40 Acres Productions, Hungry Eyes Media, Creative Rain Cloud, and Waterford Valley Pictures, with Toronto’s Mongrel Media as the distributor; and Jefferson Moneo’s horror There Were Witches, written by Marcelo Tobar and produced by Toronto’s Prowler Pictures and Mexico’s Fidelio Films, with Toronto’s levelFILM as the distributor.

The remaining Ontario films include Frances-Anne Solomon’s Canada/U.K. drama In the Black, which is written by Andrew Burrows-Trotman and produced by Toronto’s CaribbeanTales and the U.K.’s I Made It Films, with Toronto’s Photon Films as the distributor; and Canada/New Zealand copro I, Object, directed and written by Andrew Niccol and produced by Toronto’s Scythia Films and New Zealand’s Southern Light Films, with Mongrel Media as the distributor.

The three inter-provincial films are: K’naan Warsame’s drama Mother, Mother, produced by Toronto’s Rhombus Media and Montreal’s EMA Films, with Toronto’s Elevation Pictures and Montreal’s Entract Films as the distributors; Jason Buxton’s thriller Sharp Corner, produced by Toronto’s Alcina Pictures and Nova Scotia-based Workhorse Pictures, with Elevation Pictures attached as a distributor; and Sam McGlynn’s comedy 1989, produced by Winnipeg’s Eagle Vision and Quebec’s Paul Spence and Associates, with Mongrel Media as its distributor.

The B.C. film is Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s thriller Freaks Unknown, produced by Freak Productions and Elevation Pictures, which also serves as a distributor.

The films were chosen by an advisory committee of external and internal representatives who evaluated the projects and made recommendations to the funder. According to Telefilm, their “decision-making process considered Telefilm’s goal of fostering a diversity of voices in the industry, ensuring that Telefilm funds a balanced portfolio of productions that reflect a variety of genres, budgets and company sizes, regions of the country and points of view.”

The Talent to Watch funding announcement will be published shortly, according to a news release. In May, Telefilm Canada committed $16.37 million to 12 English-language feature-length films and $14.5 million to nine French-language feature-length films from the same stream and production program.

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