Netflix/Canadian Film Centre announce films for accelerator

TORONTO — “Firecrackers” director Jasmin Mozaffari is among the filmmakers selected for the inaugural Project Development Accelerator initiative from the Canadian Film Centre and Netflix.

The three-month initiative announced in 2018 offers advanced project development and workshopping support for the selected creators/projects.

A total four upcoming feature projects — two French and two English-language — were chosen from more than115 applications from creators across Canada.

The program runs from May through August 2020 and is tailored to the specific creative and business needs of the creators and teams.

Participants will get international creative and marketplace expertise, as well as feedback from Netflix executives, among other things.

Toronto-based Mozaffari, who made a splash with her debut feature “Firecrackers” at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, will be developing “The Path Travels Me” through the initiative. Mozaffari is the writer-director on the English-language film, which is described as “a portrait of a family of Iranian immigrants living, working and surviving in post-9/11 North America.”

The other English-language project chosen for the CFC/Netflix initiative is Toronto writer-director Rama Rau’s “Runaways,” which follows four young girls in Mumbai as they kidnap their authoritarian grandmother and go on a summer road trip.

The chosen French-language projects are “Kanava” from writer-director Henri Pardo, about a young boy and his mother who settle in a rural village in Quebec after leaving Haiti in the early 1970s. And “T’es belle Maryse” from writer-director Maxime Desmons is about a young woman who discovers that her late husband has infected her with HIV during the AIDS epidemic.

The CFC/Netflix Project Development Accelerator is part the larger Netflix/CFC Global Project, which targets Canada’s traditionally underserved creatives and communities.