Greece’s Thessaloniki Documentary Festival Set To Cancel Closing Ceremony As Country Continues To Mourn Victims Of Fatal Train Crash

With Series Mania 2023 coming to a close, the event’s founder and general director Laurence Herszberg announced the winners of the Series Mania Festival today.

Peter Caranicas Deputy Editor Continuing its global territorial expansion, Netflix picked up and is now streaming Greek TV series “Maestro in Blue,” its first-ever exclusive worldwide distribution deal for a Greek scripted series. Created for Greek broadcaster Mega TV by multihyphenate Christoforos Papakaliatis, “Maestro” was launched on the platform internationally on March 17 and this week hit the global top 10 of the most-watched shows on Netflix. “Maestro” debuted on Greek linear TV last October. Season 1, consisting of nine episodes, premiered on Netflix in Greece and Cyprus in December before expanding to audiences around the world.

Eurovision 2023 Semi-Final running orders have been revealed – check it out below.The 2023 Eurovision Song Contest will take place at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool from May 9-13, with Mae Muller set to represent the UK with ‘I Wrote A Song’.The UK city was announced to stage the contest on behalf of Ukraine, after organisers deemed the country unable to host the event due to the ongoing war with Russia.You can find all the songs that are entered for this year’s competition here.This week, Eurovision shared the running order for the Semi-Final shows, which take place on Tuesday, May 9 and Thursday, May 11.Norway will kick off proceedings for the first Semi-Final, closed out 15 acts later with a performance by Finland. The second event is set to be opened by Denmark, with Australia hitting the stage last.We got #Eurovision2023 Semi-Final running orders ✨➡️ https://t.co/V1tz85qvRD pic.twitter.com/hSjYqudp6j— Eurovision Song Contest (@Eurovision) March 22, 2023The Big Five participants – France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom, which make the biggest financial contributions to the contest – along with Ukraine, automatically qualify for the Grand Final.Check out the full schedule below.First Semi-Final Eurovision 20231. Norway2. Malta3. Serbia4. Latvia5. Portugal6. Ireland7. Croatia8. Switzerland9. Israel10. Moldova11. Sweden12. Azerbaijan13. Czechia14. Netherlands15. FinlandSecond Semi-Final Eurovision 20231. Denmark2. Armenia3. Romania4. Estonia5. Belgium6. Cyprus7. Iceland8. Greece9. Poland10. Slovenia11. Georgia12. San Marino13. Austria14. Albania15. Lithuania16. AustraliaMeanwhile, Eurovision final 2023 tickets sold out in just 36 minutes.Tickets for all nine shows including the live Grand Final went on sale

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on industry players outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week we’re talking to Heretic co-founder Giorgos Karnavas about the growth of his Athens-based production and sales house he started in 2013 with Konstantinos Kontovrakis. The company played a pivotal role in co-producing Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner and Oscar contender Triangle of Sadness, its first English-language production. 

Lille’s Series Mania Forum is kicking off today with a packed schedule of talks, screenings and competitions.

Rachel Zegler is taking critics to task over their reviews of “Shazam! Fury of the Gods”.

Sabrina Carpenter has kicked off the second leg of her Emails I Can’t Send headlining tour and we have the set list from her first show of 2023!

Warning: This post contains details from Prime Video’s “Daisy Jones & The Six” Episode 8. 

The Shazamily is back, and on a much larger scale, but at its heart this superhero saga is still about family, and that’s the good thing here.

A Royal Conservatoire of Scotland graduate has been named as one of the victims killed in a fatal train crash in Greece.

Christopher Vourlias The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival wrapped its 25th edition with a muted closing night on Sunday, with festival organizers scrapping an official award ceremony as Greece continues to mourn the loss of 57 lives in a deadly rail accident on Feb. 28. The awards for this year’s festival — including the Golden Alexander, which went to Heba Khaled, Talal Derki and Ali Wajeeh’s “Under the Sky of Damascus” — were handed out behind closed doors earlier in the day. Artistic director Orestis Andreadakis told Variety prior to the festival’s conclusion, “As a sign of respect, the festival canceled from the very start all ceremonies and festive events. In the same spirit, it was decided to call off the closing ceremony.”

EXCLUSIVE: Drift director Anthony Chen is gearing up to direct his first US-set project, Heartbeat: A New York Story, about the rarely-told experiences of the Asian gay community during the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Early on in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” enterprising London-based filmmaker Zoe (Lily James) pitches a proposed documentary about Muslim arranged marriages to a pair of white male commissioners. They’re bored and disengaged until they realize how the topic can be dressed up in the tropes and lingo of Western romantic comedy to appeal to a general British audience: One suggests interview inserts in the style of “When Harry Met Sally,” the other name-drops “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” as a reference point. When Zoe suggests titling the doc “Love Contractually,” the deal is done. Sharper than anything else in Shekhar Kapur’s pleasant, easygoing comedy, the scene neatly satirizes how nuanced cross-cultural material can be blandly packaged and whitewashed for the mainstream — a point that would land harder if “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” didn’t proceed to do much the same thing. At a push, you could credit the film — a first feature screenwriting credit for producer and former journalist Jemima Khan — with some meta self-awareness as it tackles a thorny, divisive cultural institution in the sweetest, sunniest terms possible, down to its own recurring “When Harry Met Sally”-style inserts. But to what end, exactly? As strenuously as the film professes to give arranged marriages a fair shake, its whole cornball narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love Contractually” may be the pitch, but “Love Actually” is the preferred outcome.

He said yes! After 22 seasons as Say Yes to the Dress’ bridal gown expert, Randy Fenoli is finally saying “yes” to his own wedding attire. The TLC personality, 59, popped the question to his fiancé, Mete Kobal, in December 2022 and the plans for the 2024 nuptials are underway, starting with his wardrobe for their big day.

EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based Alpha Violet has posted fresh sales on Mexican director Lila Avilés’s family drama Tótem, which world premiered in competition at the Berlinale to acclaim in February.

Krapopolis could spawn Fox’s next iconic animated figure to sit alongside Homer Simpson, Bob Belcher and Peter Griffin, according to the network’s President of Scripted Programming Michael Thorn.

Ellise Shafer In an unprecedented move, Fox has renewed Dan Harmon’s upcoming animated comedy “Krapopolis” for a third season ahead of its series premiere. Additionally, the premiere of the show — which was most recently set for May — has now been pushed to the 2023-2024 season. The news was announced by Michael Thorn, president of scripted programming at Fox Entertainment, at the London TV Screenings on Wednesday. “The 2023-24 season is the perfect launching pad for this highly-anticipated and very funny animated comedy, complete with multiple seasons of epic laughs for fans,” Thorn said. “The more we see from production, the more excited we are about their creativity, story arcs, flawless execution, brilliant voice cast and ability to pump out episode after episode of astonishing events and outrageous, unexpected hilarity.”

Prime Video is delaying the drop of the trailer for “Citadel”.

Prime Video has postponed the release of the first trailer for its global spy series from Anthony and Joe Russo in light of the tragic events in Greece where a passenger train collided with a freight train, claiming at least 38 lives, with scores of others injured.

Organizers of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival said Wednesday that they are canceling their opening ceremony and “all festive events and concerts” related to the event following a tragic train crash in Greece late Tuesday that killed at least 38 people and injured more than 60.