A year in the making thusfar, celebrated Hong Kong director Johnnie To is off to Canada for Two Gun Cohen, per reporting by Variety’s Jennie Punter on Friday. The news comes for the film’s progress as one of seven titles that will be pitched by Frontières at TIFF: The Market, which announced its new international genre showcase back in May.
The western frontier, 1911. Con man, swindler and general gadabout, Morris Cohen, is in a bind. Sitting in a jail cell after being caught cheating at cards, Cohen’s luck appears to have finally run out. That is until a mysterious Chinese man makes him an offer: “Ask no questions, join our service and we will bail you out.”
It’s an easy decision, but little does Cohen know that his new employer is fomenting an armed rebellion half a world away and is being pursued by ruling forces that will stop at nothing to eliminate the threat.
The big name on the card is producer Todd Brown, formerly of XYZ Films and once responsible for helping place a number of genre delights on our watchlists with titles like The Dead Lands, Pilgrimage, Apostle, Mandy, The Raid and The Raid 2: Berandal, and invariably, The Furious. He tells Punter that he and the team aim to “create a ‘dim sum western’ that fuses the eastern and western elements of the story into something bold and unique.”
Patrick Whistler who also wrote another favorite of this site with Maxime Giroux’s In Cold Light is penning the script. More from the report below:
Producer Todd Brown had searched for a project that would allow him to bring Johnnie To to Canada, and when he heard the story of Morris “Two Gun” Cohen, he knew he’d found it. The team includes producer Chris Yurkovich (“Slash/Back”), EP Michael Solomon, and writer Patrick Whistler (“In Cold Light”). “This true story of a perpetual grifter living in the Canadian prairies who became personal bodyguard, trusted confidant and general to Dr Sun Yat Sen is so outlandish that nobody would believe it if you made it up,” Brown says.
To is accompanied by a total of nearly four dozen award wins for a career in the director’s chair in TV and film that dates back as far as 1980, long before shaping his craft and eventually establishing his Milkyway Image production label in the 90s. A select raft of directing credits include The Heroic Trio, Fulltime Killer, PTU, Running On Karma, Throw Down, Exiled, Drug War, Chasing Dream, and co-directing the 2020 anthology, Septet: The Story of Hong Kong. More recently, Toh also served as a member of the International Competition Jury for the 37th Tokyo International Film Festival in 2024.
Further filming dates and details remain pending. Read more at Variety.