The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market has selected 24 projects for its 2026 edition, running October 28-30 during TIFFCOM. Its new partnership with Fantasia's Frontières market brings five genre projects into the lineup, including Almeida's She, Crocodile.

The film has already spent time on the international development circuit. It was presented at the San Sebastián Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum in 2024 and later appeared at the European Film Market and Cannes' Marché du Film. Tokyo is another financing step rather than the project's first announcement.

She was already a predator before becoming a crocodile

Bianca Comparato stars as the young sole heir to a luxury real-estate brokerage in Rio de Janeiro. Her body begins to change until she is gradually becoming a crocodile — hungry, dangerous and in need of human flesh.

The transformation is deliberately blunt. Almeida is taking a woman who already occupies an extremely privileged economic position and physically moving her to the top of another hierarchy: the food chain.

That is where the movie's body horror starts colliding with its social satire. The monster is not arriving from outside this wealthy environment. It grows out of someone who was already benefiting from it.

The difficult question is who she chooses to eat

Once the protagonist needs human flesh to survive, Crocodila turns feeding into a moral decision. Does she prey on members of her own social class? Does she eat people below her? Who gets classified as expendable when survival becomes an excuse?

Almeida has described the film as both bodily and social horror, explicitly connecting the crocodile to the idea of an apex predator. She has also pointed to Kafka's The Metamorphosis as an influence, particularly its surreal acceptance of an impossible physical transformation inside an otherwise recognizable social order.

The filmmaker has spoken more broadly about body horror as an especially potent form for women directors, arguing that women's bodies are routinely judged, regulated and subjected to changes beyond their control. Crocodila takes that idea somewhere considerably wetter and more carnivorous.

Bianca Comparato is tied closely to the project

Comparato, known internationally for Netflix's 3%, has been attached as the lead through the project's various market appearances. She is also part of the wider production story around South, the Brazilian company developing the film.

Almeida is both writer and director. Her earlier features Friendly Beast and The Father's Shadow already established her interest in using genre, violence and domestic unease for purposes well beyond simple shock.

She has also emphasized the physical construction of Crocodila's monster. The protagonist's mutation is intended to be materially important on screen rather than existing only as an abstract metaphor.

It still needs financing before the crocodile can start eating

South's market materials list an estimated budget of roughly $2.085 million and a planned runtime of around 100 minutes. The Portuguese-language production involves South in Brazil, Peculiar in Spain and Oublaum in Portugal, with Vitrine Filmes attached for Brazilian distribution.

The project remains in development. More recent reporting places filming in 2027 in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, superseding older market documents that had still described the film as a 2026 project.

No firm release date has been announced. For now, She, Crocodile is still assembling the financing required to turn its very simple pitch — rich woman becomes crocodile — into something appropriately monstrous.