Paris-based production companies SCoT(T) and The Project have boarded ‘Gro(ceries),’ a vampire self-identity comedy starring ‘Sex Education’s’ Chinenye Ezeudu-Sterling, who is also the co-writer with director Sophie King.
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The news comes ahead of the project’s participation in Fantasia Festival’s Frontières Co-Production Market, held July 22–25 in Montreal.
U.K.-based lead producers Rosanna Eden-Ellis (Five By Five Films) and Catherine Joy White (Kusini Productions), who are presenting the project at Frontières, told Variety they are now targeting a Q1 2027 shoot in the U.K. and beginning early conversations about casting.
“SCoT(T) and The Project have helped bring more than a dozen independent films to the screen,” said Eden-Ellis. “Their involvement further strengthens the project’s international production and financing framework.”
“We’re excited by the opportunities that international collaboration is opening up for the project while keeping it rooted in a distinctly British voice,” White said.
The film follows Gro (Ezeudu-Sterling), a lonely night-shift worker raised by vampires, who discovers she’s adopted and will never become one of them. After taking desperate measures to transform, she is forced to confront the true cost of becoming the monster she’s always longed to be.
The project was initially conceived a short by Ezeudu-Sterling and King, who had previously collaborated on short films, but the producers agreed that the central character and her world deserved a larger story and wanted to help shape that transition and take the project into development.
Participation in the Glasgow Film Festival’s Funny Features Lab earlier this year transformed the project, giving the creative team the time and space to develop the script while working with mentors Prano Bailey-Bond and David Pope.
“Just as importantly, it gave us the opportunity to pitch the project to sales agents, financiers and industry executives very early in its development,” White said. “The response confirmed that there is a genuine appetite for modern, elevated, auteur-led genre with commercial potential.
“Frontières feels like the natural next step,” she added. “It has long been on our radar as one of the world’s leading co-production markets dedicated to fantastic cinema. We’re super excited to meet international partners and deepen conversations around international finance, sales and distribution.”
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