Disney+ Original ‘The Good Mothers’ Scoops Berlinale Series Award

Addie Morfoot Contributor Filmmaker Penny Lane (“Listening to Kenny G”) is known for her insightful, thought-provoking, humorous documentaries. But her most recent docu, “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” is her most personal to date. In 2019 the director decided to become a Good Samaritan organ donor – a term given to a person who donates a kidney to a stranger, someone she’s never met and never will meet.

‘Riceboy Sleeps’ Scoops Top Canadian Film AwardAnthony Shim’s Riceboy Sleeps has won Canada’s biggest film award, the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award. The prize, decided by the Toronto Film Critics Association (TFCA), comes with a CAN$100,000 ($72,000) cash prize. Riceboy Sleeps beat nominees Clement Virgo’s Brother and David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. The semi-autobiographical film explores the challenges of living between two cultures through the tale of a Korean immigrant single mother raising her son in Canada. Shot in the Greater Vancouver area and Korea, the feature world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, winning its Platform Prize, and then played in Busan and a raft of other festivals. The win comes as Toronto-based distributor Game Theory Films gears up for the title’s Canadian release on March 17. The feature will also be released in Korea, Singapore and the US in the coming months.  “The Toronto film community has been so good to us since TIFF where this crazy journey first began and I hope to make more films in the future that will warrant the same type of support,” commented Shim.

Frank Doelger’s eco-thriller drama The Swarm has made a splash on German TV.

Gary Glitter is in development at Netflix.The three-part series, currently under the working title Hunting Gary Glitter, will cover the singer’s life story and his later conviction for child sex abuse offences.Along with featuring unseen photographs and archive footage, the series will include access to the journalists who pursued Glitter over several years and alerted authorities to his whereabouts in South East Asia, leading to his arrest.The series is directed by Sam Hobkinson (The Confession) and produced by Cammy Millard (The Puppet Master). Production has been underway for a number of months.According to The Times, Amazon Prime Video and ITV also have documentaries in the works about the singer.Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, was jailed for 16 years in February 2015 after being found guilty of sexually abusing three young girls between 1975 and 1980.He was sentenced for attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault, and one for having sex with a girl under 13.

EXCLUSIVE: MRC has made a deal to develop Pornsak Pichetshote’s Eisner Award-winning graphic novel bestseller The Good Asian into a series. James Wan, Michael Clear and Rob Hackett are producing for Atomic Monster. Will Rowbotham and Luke Maxwell are producing for 3 Arts. 

Bebe Rexha is sharing some stomach-turning, behind-the-scenes details of the music video for her and David Guetta’s chart-topping banger “I’m Good (Blue)”.

EXCLUSIVE: Generation star Nava Mau will star in Netflix’s upcoming drama series Baby Reindeer.

EXCLUSIVE: Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, John Berendt’s 1994 bestselling book and Pulitzer Prize finalist is being developed into a new musical by playwright Taylor Mac, with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, choreography by Tanya Birl and Sarah O’Gleby and direction by Rob Ashford.

The restructures, layoffs, cancelations and a maybe-strike currently impacting the U.S. TV industry rippled through the halls of the Berlinale Series Market this week as senior execs forecasted an international future.

Naman Ramachandran Acclaimed actor Vijay Varma is one of the leads in “Dahaad” (“Roar”), the first Indian series to compete in the Berlinale Series Competition. Produced by Excel Entertainment and Tiger Baby and directed by Reema Kagti (Amazon Prime Video series “Made in Heaven”) and Ruchika Oberoi (Venice winner “Island City”), the other leads are Sonakshi Sinha, Gulshan Devaiah and Sohum Shah. “‘Dahaad’ is about the investigation of a series of crimes conducted by a small town, rookie police officer at a small police station in Rajasthan [western India] – there are these disappearing girls and somehow the young police officer finds a certain similarity between these these disappearances,” Varma told Variety. “It’s a slow burn, investigative drama and it’s also very atmospheric and moody and noir-ish.”

The Good Mothers, Disney+’s hard-hitting mafia drama series, has won the first ever Berlinale Series Award.

Oscar luncheon magnet Tom Cruise, all Emmy and Oscar un-nominated for their work over the past year but represented in the Critics Choice Super Award nominations, honoring horror, superhero, science fiction and action movies and television series.Oscar nominees such as Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) are also repped here, as well as Colin Farrell, nominated twice for two of his other 2022 films, “After Yang” and “The Batman”. (Co-nominee Brendan Fraser managed a nod for the HBO Max series “Doom Patrol as well).

Christopher Vourlias The crime noir genre gets a distinctly South African twist in the new series “Donkerbos,” which premiered its first episodes this week as part of the Berlinale Series Market Selects lineup at the European Film Market. The show begins when the bodies of six children are found in the forests of a provincial backwater town, and a local detective (Erica Wessels) is called in to investigate the shocking crimes. But as the series unfolds, she’s forced to wrestle with her dark past, her family and a distrustful community to catch the killer before another child is taken. Written and directed by Nico Scheepers, “Donkerbos” is produced by Nagvlug Films and sold globally by MultiChoice, which bowed the show last year on its SVOD platform Showmax.

The White Lotus is almost certainly checking into an Asian hotel for its third season — and it’s been revealed Netflix’s Dahmer star Evan Peters nearly starred in the second run.

EXCLUSIVE: Members of the first ever Berlinale Series Award jury have predicted that TV awards could soon rival film at the world’s major festivals.

BreAnna Bell ITV America (“Queer Eye”) and production studio Good Company (Beyonce’s “Lemonade”) have announced new unscripted series “Category Is” (working title), an eight-episode documentary series focusing on New York City’s Ballroom scene through the lens of one of its most prominent houses: The House of Miyake-Mugler. Executive produced by Yusef Williams (“Overall Father” of the House of Miyake-Mugler), the series chronicles the personal and professional lives of nine members of this all-Black and queer “chosen family.” Power struggles, romance and interpersonal rivalries abound as they battle to make names for themselves in the House, the Ballroom scene and around the world, smashing stereotypes and overcoming tremendous adversity.

Christopher Vourlias Firefly Productions is prepping a new high-end drama that the Belgrade-based outfit is billing as Serbia’s first ever superhero series. “Generation Tesla” is based on the famed Serbian American inventor Nikola Tesla, best known for his pioneering work on electricity. In the series Tesla creates an electric frequency at the time of his death that opens a portal to a new dimension, where many of his unfinished projects and ideas are hidden. As the keeper of a vast trove of secrets and knowledge, Tesla must confront the greatest enemy ever known to man, who is looking to steal the secret of this mysterious frequency to rule the world. To fight him, Tesla assembles a team of superheroes, whom he contacts through a video game-obsessed teenager, in order to save the planet.

Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler director Felicity Morris has said the documentary market is going to contract and warned filmmakers against “chasing the next viral story that everyone is talking about.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent New Disney+ original series “The Good Mothers,” which provides a fresh female take on the Calabrian mob, marks a case of truly organic collaboration between the U.K. and Italy to ensure that a great story didn’t risk losing an iota of authenticity.  The show, which is competing in the “Berlinale Series” section, depicts the Calabrian mob through the prism of three daring women inside the ‘Ndrangheta organized crime clan who collaborated with a female prosecutor and withstood the consequences of their attempt to escape its iron grip. It is produced produced by Juliette Howell, Tessa Ross and Harriet Spencer for London’s House Productions, which originated the project, and by Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Gangarossa for Rome’s Wildside, a Fremantle company, which helped to firmly root the story in its Calabrian context.

Marta Balaga Crime shows look for a new angle, argued Berlinale Series participants on Monday.  There is no shortage of new offerings, from Berlinale Market Selects’ “Two Sides of the Abyss,” Serbia’s “The Fall” or South Africa’s “Donkerbos,” created by Nico Scheepers, to China’s melancholic, decades-spanning “Why Try to Change Me Now,” with Golden Bear winner Yinan Diao attached as executive producer. But while there is still an appetite for traditional detective stories, producers and broadcasters are venturing out of the “damaged, middle-aged white detective slot on a Sunday night,” suggested All3Media International’s Rachel Glaister. They are also thinking about their younger audience.