Eight projects have been selected to participate in the inaugural Nordic Genre Lab, taking place during Finnish Film Affair, the industry event of Helsinki International Film Festival. The news was first reported over at ScreenDaily.
ScreenAnarchy's founder Todd Brown, friend to Nordic peoples everywhere, was among the trio of industry professionals who chose these eight projects. The other two experts are producer and consultant Claire Willats (Netflix's Troll) and Norwegian producer Einar Loftesnes (Kraken, The Tunnel). "Herra" Todd and Willats we be on hand to mentor each group participating during the Lab in late September.
The Nordic Genre Lab is a training and networking programme for genre feature films in development from the Nordic countries. It will take place on September 24-25 during Finnish Film Affair, the industry event of Helsinki International Film Festival – Love & Anarchy.The programme will contain mentoring from Willats and Brown, pitch training, deck consulting, workshops, a visit to Helsinki’s Fireframe LED Screen Studio, and a live pitching competition to an industry jury. The Lab is supported by the Nordisk Kulturfond.“The 28 submissions we received from across the entire Nordic region confirmed what we already believed: there is an enormous wealth of genre talent in the North, and a real hunger for a dedicated space to develop and launch these projects internationally,” said Willats. “The eight selected projects represent an extraordinary range of genre filmmaking — from folk horror rooted in Faroese landscape to dystopian survival thriller in Norway and from animated psychological horror to dark political satire from Finland and more — and we cannot wait to work with these teams in September.”“I think we’ve ended with a selection that is engaging, challenging, surprising and often quite fun,” said Brown. “We can’t wait to dive into things in more depth with all of the teams.”
The eight projects selected for the Lab follow, with synopses for each one. Primarily from the host nation of Finland other projects come out of Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the impossibly too beautiful to be the stage for a survival horror called Whistler, the Faroe Islands.
Of the eight projects the one that comes in with the established high profile is the Swedish thriller Trespassers. That will be produced by Patrik Andersson and Jakob Abrahamsson for Mylla Films. Andersson co-created, developed and produced Ari Aster’s Midsommar.
These could be the next big Nordic genre films to come out of that region over the next couple years.
Nordic Genre Lab 2026 projectsSynopses provided by the LabAlma (Fin) dir. Pete Riski; wri. Ilja Rautsi; prods. Pauliina Piipponen, Kai Nordberg, Kaarle Aho for Making Movies LtdWhen 17-year-old Jasmin meets her estranged grandmother Alma, she’s dragged into a deadly confrontation between Alma’s telekinetic past and the monster her powers created.Echo Chamber (Fin) dir. Juha Fiilin; wri. Adam Cullen; prods. Juha Fiilin, Debbie Stephens for Fiilin Good Films OyA Nordic psychological survival horror animation following two cursed sisters, Haruka and Yui, anyone who sees them up close transforms into a violent monster, who must cross a frozen landscape and return to the island where their mother died in a fire to break the curse, confronting the grief that has kept them apart.Linden Lane 6 (Fin) dir. Josefina Rautiainen; wris. Aino Putaala, Kirsti Riekkola; prod. Anita Hypponen for It’s Alive FilmsA recently divorced novelist seeking solitude moves into a remote apartment building inhabited entirely by women, where strange rituals and the disappearance of a former male tenant lead him to uncover a horrifying secret.Long Way Home (Nor) wri-dir. Kjersti Helen Rasmussen; prod. Njal Lambrechts for TruewestA character-driven dystopian road movie in which, after an electromagnetic pulse wipes out all electricity across Western Norway, 22-year-old Tea and her neighbour Herman set out on a dangerous journey through a frozen and increasingly lawless landscape to reach her childhood home, confronting both the chaos around them and the darkness within.Sauna Diplomacy (Fin) dir. Teemu Niukkanen; prod. John Lundsten for Tack FilmsA dark comedy set during the height of Finlandization in 1970, in which a diligent Finnish diplomat is ordered to host a high-ranking Soviet official at his summer cottage for the weekend. What begins as an awkward diplomatic retreat descends into humiliation, manipulation, and psychological power games — an intimate and absurd portrait of how much a person, or a country, can bend before breaking.The Evil Eye (Den) dir. Kristian Lidegaard; wris. Kristian Lidegaard, Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen; prod. Maria Moller Kjeldgaard for Manna FilmAn online found-footage horror film in which the main character, Oliver, is both the villain and the creator of the film we are watching - obsessed with Lucas, a successful young swimmer who bullied him as a child, he secretly films and infiltrates his victim’s life, sharing increasingly disturbing “films” on a closed online forum until the line between observer and destroyer disappears entirely.Trespassers (Swe) dir. Johannes Persson; wris. Johannes Persson, Melina Maraki; prods. Patrik Andersson, Jakob Abrahamsson for Mylla FilmsA backwoods horror-thriller in which four young people from a failed anti-establishment movement travel to the vast wilderness of Northern Sweden to reconnect with nature, but after a river rafting accident leaves them stranded, they discover they are not alone — and not welcome — on land controlled by a group that has isolated itself for centuries with its own terrifying beliefs.Whistler (Far) wri-dir. Gudmund Helmsdal; prod. Jon Hammer for Outlier ProjectsA survival folk horror set on the bird cliffs and grazing lands of the Faroe Islands, where four marine biologists race to catch the last ferry after their guide’s fatal climbing accident, only to find themselves hunted across forbidden grazing land by a reclusive farmer who uses a bone whistle to command a pack of grotesque half-human creatures.