Market In Focus: Rome’s MIA Market Gears Up For Its Most Internationally-Focused Edition To Date

The Foreign Office has updated its travel advice for Italy and the Vatican City over concerns surrounding political demonstrations.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Beta Film has announced a half-dozen sales to European public broadcasters on high-end period drama “La Storia,” which is Italian pubcaster RAI’s biggest event show of the year and is world premiering at the Rome Film Fest. The sweeping eight-episode saga, set in Italy during the final years of World War II and its immediate aftermath, is based on a globally bestselling novel by the late great Elsa Morante, whom “My Brilliant Friend” author Elena Ferrante often cites as her primary literary reference.

EXCLUSIVE: Roku this past weekend saw the fruits from its big push into Spanish original content as the Greice Santo-created music reality series, Serenata de las Estrellas, notched the streamer’s biggest opening weekend by reach for any Spanish-language Roku Original.

Ben Croll Acclaimed Romanian animator Anca Damian has lined up her next live-action feature. The filmmaker behind Annecy top prizewinner “Crulic: The Path to Beyond” and “Marona’s Fantastic Tale” will write and direct “First People on Earth,” a tragicomic family saga about a biracial woman re-experiencing her native Namibia after decades in Europe. Returning to her birth country for a family funeral, and bringing her non-verbal, pre-adolescent son in tow, the heroine falls in with a troupe of theatrical Bushmen – an Indigenous tribe, divorced from their historic lands, forced to re-enact ancestral myths for tourist dollars.

Ben Croll A romantic comedy about an Israeli-Palestinian couple based on the real life story of creators Nayef Hammoud and Gal Rosenbluth, the development series “Non-Issue” won the Paramount+ drama prize at this year’s MIA Market, which wrapped its ninth edition on an optimistic note. Of course, well before Friday’s closing award ceremony, the heartbreaking crisis in the Middle East cast a heavy pall over an otherwise ebullient audiovisual market, often informing conversations professional and otherwise.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Investment in original content production continues to grow in Italy where resources across all genres reached a total of €1.8 billion ($1.9 billion) thanks to increased investments from U.S. streamers.

Spend on Italian TV and film productions shot upwards by 28% to €1.8B ($1.9B) last year, the latest report into the country’s sector revealed today.

Ben Croll Imagine Documentaries, the non-fiction branch of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, is looking to boost a new generation of documentary talent. Speaking at a panel at Rome’s MIA Market, Imagine Documentaries president Sara Bernstein revealed that her company has signed a development deal with filmmakers Isabel Bethencourt and Parker Hill, whose teenagers-in-Texas portrait “Cusp” premiered to critical acclaim at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, while praising director Jackie Jesko, whose three-part, true-crime doc “Savior Complex” premiered on HBO last month.

The MIA Market, Rome’s splashy precursor to Mipcom Cannes, is almost over and there has been plenty to digest. Attendants from all over the world including a healthy dose of U.S. C-suite star power have been listening intently in the cinema screening rooms on the Piazza Barberini all week, and there has been plenty to discuss, as execs from around the world ponder a path to normality following a year of chaos and disruption. Meanwhile, the Israeli-Hamas conflict rages and the world mourns, with ripples felt here in Rome. See below for Deadline’s key takeaways from the annual TV and film confab.

EXCLUSIVE: Hollywood vet Gianni Nunnari, producer on movies including the 300 franchise, Immortals, and From Dusk Til Dawn, is teaming with producer Simon Horsman (Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers, Magazine Dreams) to launch Euro Gang Entertainment.

“Hollywood should be jealous of what Spain is doing and our facilities allow for this,” Netflix Spain and Portugal boss Diego Ávalos proclaimed today.

“We’re trying to introduce entirely new filmmakers into the repertoire of our company,” Anonymous Content‘s David Levine said today.

A European TV project will soon be on the same quality level as American but for half the cost, predicted Mediawan, Sony and Universal International Studios (UIS) execs today.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian distribution and production company Notorious Pictures is expanding into the TV series sphere by snapping up rights to buzzy literary property “Forbidden Notebook,” a 1952 novel by Italian-Cuban writer Alba de Céspedes that has been recently rediscovered and successfully republished in English. De Céspedes has been described by the New York Times as “a bestselling novelist and political activist in her native Italy” admired for her sensitive depictions of women whose recently rediscovered work “has lost none of its subversive force.” She is considered a source of inspiration for Elena Ferrante, the Italian writer with legions of fervent fans around the world and whose four “Neapolitan Novels” have been adapted into the long-running “My Brilliant Friend” TV series by Italy’s RAI and HBO.

Dreaming Whilst Black brought a new, diverse audience to the BBC in droves, according to the buzzy comedy’s EP Dhanny Joshi, who was speaking on a panel of diverse creatives at MIA Market.

With a budget less than 20 times that of The Boys and “barely” any marketing, Amazon Prime Video‘s Invincible has succeeded through word of mouth and attracting new viewers to the genre, according to its EP Marge Dean.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Rome’s MIA Market, dedicated to international TV series, animation, feature films, documentaries and more, kicked off Monday in the Eternal City’s 17th century Palazzo Barberini. There were some 2,300 registered industry execs on day one – roughly 300 of which are buyers – more than 120 selected projects on display, and plenty of panels.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Gael Garcia Bernal is set to preside over the jury of the upcoming Rome Film Festival. The Mexican actor, director and producer will be judging entries and bestowing prizes in the rebooted fest’s main section, which is now known as Progressive Cinema. Films competing for Rome prizes include Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s “Un Amor,” about a young woman socially and sexually exploited by a rural patriarchy; Iranian director Farhad Delaram, in which a former filmmaker turned medic decides to help a female political prisoner escape from a psych ward; and French director Mehdi Fikri’s “After The Fire,” which turns on a French woman of North African descent who seeks justice after her younger brother dies suspiciously after being stopped by the police.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Rome’s upcoming MIA market dedicated to international TV series, animation, feature films and documentaries is set to run Oct. 9-13 in central Rome’s Palazzo Barberini, which besides being Italy’s National Ancient Art gallery, is also the market’s main hub. Now at its ninth edition, this innovative pre-Mipcom event (the MIA acronym stands for the Mercato Internazionale Audiovisivo or International Audiovisual Market) aims to boost the Italian industry by strengthening its international ties.

EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based genre specialist Reel Suspects has boarded sales on Japanese horror director Takeshi Kushida’s My Mother’s Eyes and will launch the title at the upcoming MIA Market in Rome.