The American Film Market’s 47th edition, taking place Nov. 10-15 at the Fairmont Century Plaza, AMC Century City and The Pavilion in Los Angeles, arrives at a moment of near-total disruption for the independent film business. The models that have long underpinned financing, production and distribution are in flux, squeezed by consolidation, changing audience habits and a market in which the traditional routes to getting a film made and seen are no longer a given.
But the upheaval is also opening doors. A new generation of online creators-turned-filmmakers — Curry “Obsession” Barker, Kane “Backrooms” Parson and Mark “Iron Lung” Fischbach among them — is proving that audiences can be built outside the traditional system and carried onto screens.
“Oddly, every independent success is still seen as a fluke, or gets put in a bucket,” says Jackie Brenneman, the new head of IFTA, which runs AFM. “What’s not being seen is that almost none of these films should have happened, because the structure of the business doesn’t support independent film. That they’ve broken through the way they have is just the tip of the iceberg of demand. Once we build the infrastructure to connect audiences with the stories they want across all different screens, the numbers are going to be much bigger.”
That sense of untapped demand is echoed by international sellers, some of whom are returning to the market after time away. Among them is South Korea’s Finecut, back at AFM after several years with the animated feature Long Long Night, from Korean director Kyu Bock Youm, which follows a rhino and a penguin as they journey across the wilderness together. “As one of the last markets of the year, AFM is an important opportunity to introduce titles launched after Cannes to buyers, particularly for North and Latin America,” says Finecut sales manager JD Kim. “Considering the trajectory from Parasite to K-Pop Demon Hunters, I believe global interest in Korean culture and content remains strong.”
THR’s 2026 Hot List of the titles generating buzz at AFM spans star-led packages, international genre plays, animation, prestige dramas and films at various stages of production. The common thread is a search for projects — and business models — that can find their audience in a rapidly changing independent landscape.
-
‘Almost You’
Image Credit: Lisa O’CONNOR / AFP, Gareth Cattermole, Stephanie Augello Almost You
DIRECTOR Matt Lipsey
STARS Juno Temple, Joey King, James McAvoy
BUZZ AI and grief collide in this high-concept tale about a robotics engineer mourning her younger sister, who feeds years of messages, videos and social media posts into an AI replica of her. The invention brings comfort — at first — before forcing her to confront a thorny question: if you could bring someone back, should you? A trio of Temple, King and McAvoy gives the timely premise some marquee value for buyers.
SALES Bankside Films, UTA
-
‘A Speck in the Sea‘
Image Credit: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage, Katie FLORES / AFP A Speck in the Sea
DIRECTOR Orlando Von Einsiedel
STARS Josh Brolin, Jeremy Renner
BUZZ Oscar-winning documentarian Von Einsiedel (The White Helmets) makes his fiction debut with this based-on-a-true survival tale of Johnny Aldridge (Brolin), a Montauk lobster fisherman who falls off his fishing boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the dead of night, with his best friend Anthony Sosinski (Renner), asleep below deck.
-
‘Breakwater’
Image Credit: Daniele Venturelli, Mike Marsland/WireImage Breakwater
DIRECTOR Luc Walpoth
STARS Olga Kurylenko, Alex Pettyfer
BUZZ Action thrillers are a go-to at any AFM, which bodes well for this neo-noir project, about a woman trapped in a toxic marriage (Kurylenko) whose plan to blackmail her rich sadistic husband (Pettyfer) goes horribly wrong, landing her and her accomplice in a fight for survival on the high seas.
SALES WestEnd Films
-
‘Control’
Image Credit: Stefania D’Alessandro, Gareth Cattermole Control
DIRECTOR Robert Schwentke
STARS James McAvoy, Julianne Moore
BUZZ One of the higher-profile star-driven actioners on offer at AFM, this feature, from the director of Red, features McAvoy as a man who wakes up one morning with an untraceable device planted in his head and must follow a mysterious voice’s instructions or devastating consequences.
SALES Studiocanal
-
‘Darlington’
Image Credit: Gareth Cattermole, Dia Dipasupil, Manoli Figetakis Darlington
DIRECTOR Sascha Gervasi
STARS Renée Zellweger, Dominic Sessa, Peter Dinklage
BUZZ Zellweger plays a faded television actress invited to reprise her most famous role — only this time in the real world. Her host (Sessa) is a reclusive tech billionaire who has restored an English country estate and lives there as if it were 1923. As she settles into his carefully controlled fantasy, the line between illusion and reality starts to blur. Alexander Payne is on board as executive producer, which should add some cachet to the package.
SALES Rocket Science, CAA
-
‘The Face of Horror’
Image Credit: Paul Archuleta, Aurore Marechal The Face of Horror
DIRECTOR Anna Biller
STARS Jonah Hauer-King, Kristine Froseth, Leo Suter
BUZZ Biller’s gothic horror takes its cue from Yotsuya Kaidan, Japan’s most famous ghost story and a cornerstone of Japanese horror, adapted more than 30 times, including by Takashi Miike as Over Your Dead Body in 2014. Set amid war and plague, the story follows a knight who kills a landowner, marries his daughter and vows to avenge the very crime he committed. When he betrays her, his wife returns from the grave to exact revenge, drawing his squire and her sister into the supernatural reckoning.
SALES Embankment Films
-
‘Falcon’
Image Credit: Courtesy of @DR Falcon
DIRECTOR Marco Bellocchio
STARS Pierfrancesco Favino, Louis Garrel, Benedetta Cimatti, Barbara Ronchi, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
BUZZ Bellocchio turns his lens on the boardroom with this drama about Sergio Marchionne (Favino) and his bid to rescue Fiat from the brink of collapse. Framed as a financial thriller with a psychological edge, the film tracks Marchionne’s battles with General Motors and Chrysler and his mentorship of heir John Elkann (Garrel), while counting the personal cost of saving an industrial empire.
SALES Rai Cinema International Distribution
-
‘Feed’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Getty Feed
DIRECTOR Leslye Headland
STAR Rosamund PikeBUZZ This new project, which Pike will also produce, could provide an injection of socially-conscious body horror in the vein of The Substance for indie buyers. Inspired by 2022 Finnish feature Hatching, it stars Pike as a Muminfluencer desperate to make her gymnast daughter an online sensation. But when she turns to a suspicious supplement to help her along, monstrous things begin to happen.
SALES The Veterans, CAA Media Finance
-
‘Found Alive’
Image Credit: XYZ Films Found Alive
DIRECTOR Carlota Pereda
STARS Chloë Grace Moretz, Rupert Friend
BUZZ Genre buyers get a festival-tested option here: the thriller opened the 2026 Sitges Film Festival ahead of its AFM outing. Ten years after escaping a sadistic captor, a young woman agrees to mentor a newly rescued survivor. When the girl’s story points to other missing victims, she is drawn into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. The English-language debut of Piggy director Pereda is adapted from Carla Norton’s Edge of Normal book series.
SALES XYZ Films; CAA Media Finance, XYZ Films
-
‘Get Rid of It’
Image Credit: Tiffany Rose, Lionel Hahn, Brianna Bryson Get Rid of It
DIRECTOR Ry Russo-Young
STARS Daisy Ridley, Sosie Bacon, Simon Rex
BUZZ A one-night stand leaves Harper with something unexpected growing inside her in this horror thriller, which sends her and her estranged sister on a desperate search for medical help. With the man from the encounter, religious fanatics and, eventually, the FBI all in pursuit, the sisters must confront both the creature and the wounds that drove them apart. The film is scheduled to shoot in February 2027.
SALES Upgrade, CAA Media Finance, Range Select
-
‘Gods Don’t Give Gifts’
Image Credit: AGC Marketing Gods Don’t Give Gifts
DIRECTOR Zack London
STARS Richard Cotton, Sam Dale, Ben Kersley
BUZZ Add another name to the roster of online creators making the leap to features: YouTuber Zack London (Gossip Goblin) makes his debut with this animated sci-fi horror anthology, set in a future where transhumanism has pushed humanity far beyond recognition. Across four stories, ordinary people turn to strange new technologies to satisfy primal urges, exposing a widening rift between body and mind.
SALES AGC Studios
-
‘It’s Alright’
Image Credit: Paras Griffin, Mike Marsland It’s Alright
DIRECTOR Scott Stewart
STARS Paul Bettany, Asha Banks, Colin Firth, Gugu Mbatha-Raw
BUZZ A Brit feel-good comedy with a strong music hook, this feature from Legion and Dark Skies director Stewart sees Bettany playing an aging rock star, with real-life pop singer Banks as his estranged daughter, an aspriring singer-songwriter. With a score produced by Marius de Vries, music producer on La La Land, CODA and Moulin Rouge!, this package should have AFM buyers humming along.
SALES Protagonist Pictures, CAA Media Finance
-
‘I’m With Stupid’
Image Credit: Jenna Berman, Alexandra Carillo-Vaccino, Oriana Layendecker I’m With Stupid
DIRECTOR Hannah Pearl Utt
STARS Jacob Tremblay, Kate McKinnon, Ego Nwodim, Chabely Ponce
BUZZ A teen comedy about two slackers at the opposite ends of their high school’s social spectrum forced to work together to try and graduate. With few mainstream comedies on offer in the market, this could be the one to get buyers to open up.
SALES Upgrade, UTA Independent Film Group, After Hours
-
‘In Her Shadow’
Image Credit: Paras Griffin/Getty Images for ESSENCE In Her Shadow
DIRECTOR Rowan Athale
STARS Letitia Wright
BUZZ This supernatural horror thriller sees Black Panther: Wakanda Forever star Wright playing Annie Cutter, a celebrated author who adopts the daughter of her estranged, recently-deceased sister, a girl her sister kept locked in a basement for five years. But after taking the girl in, Cutter begins to suspect her sister may have had a reason to be afraid of the child.
SALES Bankside Films
-
‘The Journeyman’
Image Credit: John Parra, Francois G. Durand The Journeyman
DIRECTOR Ángel Manuel Soto
STARS Patrick Schwarzenegger, Leslie Grace
BUZZ Blue Beetle director Soto pivots to sports-crime with this story of a down-on-his-luck tennis pro who is drawn into the dark world of match-fixing as he tries to make ends meet for his family. Schwarzenegger and Grace lead the cast.
SALES AGC Studios, WME, UTA
-
‘The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd’
Image Credit: Benoit Soler The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd
DIRECTOR Tim Blake Nelson
STARS Amanda Seyfried, Scoot McNairy
BUZZ Based on true events, this drama, which premiered to strong reviews in Toronto, follows an English teacher trapped in an abusive marriage who takes a job at a maximum-security prison in Oklahoma and falls for a charismatic inmate who is also a student in her class.
SALES WestEnd Films
-
‘Mare Nostrum‘
Image Credit: Courtesy of HanWay Mare Nostrum
DIRECTORS Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat
STAR Antonio Banderas
BUZZ This feature, from the Argentine directors of Official Competition (2021) should have potential beyond the Spanish-language market. Banderas stars as a container ship captain who takes on a boat of African migrants, only to land in a political storm when he tries to dock in Europe.
SALES HanWay
-
‘The Portrait’
Image Credit: Samir Hussein, Michael Loccisano The Portrait
DIRECTOR Sarah Colangelo
STARS Gillian Anderson, Rebecca Hall
BUZZ A pitch for a more adult demographic, this new project from Colangelo, director of The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) is billed as a Hitchcockian thriller about an acclaimed writer (Anderson) who for years has been having an affair with a married man. When he is struck ill and she can’t see him anymore, the writer commissions his artist wife (Hall), to paint her portrait, setting up a showdown between the two women.
SALES Rocket Science, WME
-
‘Safe Space’
Image Credit: Lisa O’CONNOR / AFP, Aurore Marechal Safe Space
DIRECTOR Gillian Wallace Horvat
STARS Joey King, LaKeith Stanfield
BUZZ Dating is hard enough without an alien. In this high-concept sci-fi comedy from I Blame Society director Horvat, an intelligent but insecure scientist escapes a toxic relationship with a co-worker, only to rebound into what may be the most toxic relationship in the galaxy: an affair with a gorgeous alien.
SALES Lucky Number, WME, CAA
-
‘Speed The Plow’
Image Credit: David Livingston/Getty Images Speed the Plow
DIRECTOR David Mamet
STARS Anthony Mackie, Sharon Stone, Ben Mendelsohn, Emily Alyn Lind
BUZZ Hollywood inside baseball from Mamet, who revisits the town’s power games in this black comedy about a newly appointed studio chief offered a guaranteed blockbuster — or an important art-house film championed by his office temp. The choice becomes a test of professional ambition and personal integrity.
SALES The Solution Entertainment Group
-
‘Untitled Armando Iannucci Package’
Image Credit: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic Untitled Armando Iannucci Package
DIRECTOR Armando Iannucci
STARS Taron Egerton, Alicia Vikander, James McAvoy
BUZZ The award-winning writer/director of Veep and The Death of Stalin is trying his hand at the conspiracy thriller in this hot project. Plot details are being kept under wraps but the A-list cast, and Iannucci’s pedigree, should bring buyers in.
SALES FilmNation Entertainment, UTA Independent Film Group
-
‘Violet’
Image Credit: Amy Sussman, Kayla Oaddams, Taylor Hill Violet
DIRECTOR Patrick Brice
STARS Lili Reinhart, Danny Ramirez, Suki Waterhouse, Mark Duplass, Lukas Gage
BUZZ A horror thriller with a tech edge, this feature from Creep director Brice follows a widower Sean (Ramirez) trying to move on after the death of his fiancée, Violet (Waterhouse). He finds new love with his childhood friend (Reinhart). But then Sean begins to receive unsettling text messages from someone, or something, claiming to be dead ex. someone, or something, claiming to be his dead ex.
SALES FilmNation Entertainment
Original Article on Hollywood Reporter