Fantastic Fest will host an international genre film co-production market to be co-produced by Mexico’s Canana and Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey network.

Fantastic Market|Mercado Fantastico will run from Sept 19-26 in Austin, Texas, and spotlight global genre narrative projects with particular emphasis on filmmakers from Latin America, Spain, Portugal and the US.

Fantastic Fest lead programmer Rodney Perkins and festival director Kristen Bell are heading up the effort and Cristina Garza, vp of Mundial, Canana’s sales joint venture with IM Global, will be among attendees sourcing material.

“The Latin movie-going audience is the only demographic increasing in the US,” said Fantastic Fest co-founder and creative director Tim League. “Because of our proximity to Mexico and Latin America, we see a large number of emerging projects from these countries at Fantastic Fest.

“Fantastic Market is the next step in the evolution of the festival to help us further our mission to support emerging genre filmmakers from across the globe.”

“In the last few years we have seen a huge spike in the number and quality of genre films coming from Latin America,” said Canana partner Pablo Cruz. “We hope bringing these projects to the US marketplace will expand financing possibilities and international exposure for these emerging directors and producers.”

Rodriguez added that “establishing the Fantastic Market is a great opportunity to not only give the Ibero-American community a stage for their work in genre films but it’s also an outlet for the US Hispanic community to showcase their projects in an area where they are underserved. I’m excited to see what is produced.”

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