From 13-15 February, the Series Mania Co-production Forum participated in the Drama Series Days industry event at the Berlin Film Festival, where Laurence Herszberg, Director of Series Mania, selected the Austro-German series Freud to join 15 other projects to be presented at the fifth edition of the Co-production Forum, which runs in Paris from 18-21 April 2017 as part of the Series Mania festival.
For the past three years, Series Mania and the Berlin Film Festival have been bringing TV series execs together to discuss coproduction and cofinancing on a European scale. As part of this, two projects for TV series in development are given the opportunity to be presented both at the Series Mania Co-production Forum and at the Drama Series Days in Berlin.
From the six projects pitched at the Berlinale, Laurence Herszberg From the six projects pitched at the Berlin Film Festival, Laurence Herszberg selected Freud from German writer Stefan Brunner, known for his work on series such as Tatort and Kommissar Rex. This new project, which features Freud and his involvement in police investigations at the turn of the 19th century, is coproduced by Bavaria Fernsehproduktion (Germany) and Satel Film (Austria).
“Freud is a real European coproduction with strong international potential, involving an emblematic character as well-known as any international brand,” Herszberg explains.
Series producers Moritz Polter and Henrich Ambrosch are invited to the Series Mania Co- production Forum in April, where they will reveal how the project is coming along to a panel of international TV execs, all key players in the TV industry, boosting their chances of raising the financing they need.
Meanwhile in Berlin, Drama Series Days presented Warrior, a project that was featured at the Co-production Forum in April 2016. Created by filmmaker Christopher Boe (Reconstruction), Warrior is being produced by the Danish company Miso Film, producer of Those Who Kill and currently producing a new project, The Rain, for Netflix.
Series Mania has established a strong reputation among international TV industry decision makers with its Co-production Forum which has, over the space of four years, established itself as key event for networking and business.
Among the new features for the fifth edition of the Co-production Forum, which will run for four days this year, is a new prize of €50,000 to be awarded by a jury of industry execs to the best project for a series in development. Also new for 2017 is the launch of SeriesLab, a new structure to help with writing series, run in association with the Torino Film Lab.
