Ukrainian Producer Julia Sinkevych to be Series Mania Jury President

Marta Balaga Israeli director Rama Burshtein-Shai focuses on an unlikely attraction in her eight-episode series “Fire Dance,” now debuting at TV festival Series Mania in Lille, France. Faigie (Mia Ivryn) is just 18 when she starts paying closer attention to Nathan, thirtysomething married son of their ultra-Orthodox community’s leader. Produced by Yes TV, Firma Productions and Kuma Studios, it has Yes Studios handling international sales.“I don’t think it’s a story about impossible love.

Marta Balaga Just in time for the 20th anniversary of “The Wire,” celebrated during the opening of French TV festival Series Mania currently unspooling in Lille, David Simon returns to Baltimore with HBO’s miniseries “We Own This City.”Co-created with George Pelecanos and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, it focuses on true events described in Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book, chronicling the inner workings of the Gun Trace Task Force: the Baltimore Police Department unit charged with racketeering, robbery, extortion and overtime fraud in 2017.Jon Bernthal and Baltimore native Josh Charles star – as disgraced Sgt. Wayne Jenkins and GTTF detective Daniel Hersl respectively – as well as “Succession’s” Dagmara Domińczyk, McKinley Belcher III, Jamie Hector and Wunmi Mosaku.

Marta Balaga Returning barely six months after its 2021 edition, which wrapped in September, French TV festival Series Mania welcomed Jury President Julia Sinkevych,who arrived in Lille from war-torn Ukraine.“I didn’t know if I would be lucky enough to be here tonight,” said Sinkevych to a standing ovation, with Laurence Herszberg, Series Mania general director, observing that culture cannot be insensitive to what is happening.“The whole world is now admiring our resistance, the resistance of the Ukrainian people. But there is another battlefield, which is culture, and I want us to be noticed, recognized and admired on the cultural battlefield, too,” added Sinkevych.“This [conflict] has been going on for a long time and there have been many episodes in this TV series.

Series Mania boasts a plethora of riches, including, just for starters, the latest series from “The Wire’s” David Simon, and “Vikings’” Michael Hirst and “The Responder,” starring Martin Freeman, which is already being talked up as the European series of the year. And it bowed on BBC One in January. The following selection may well not rep the best 10 titles at this year’s Series Mania. Some of those will only be revealed in a final jury verdict, if then.

Marta Balaga Thanks to fresh takes on established genres and highlighting local elements, Finnish drama is commanding attention from international buyers. A Series Mania Focus on Finland will teasing more series to come, from “Nordic blue” to horror for kids and a Christmas fairytale crime story.

Tim Dams It may only be six months since 2021’s pandemic-delayed edition of Series Mania took place, but the annual Lille, France-based drama festival returns once again but this time in its traditional slot of March 18-25.It’s been “challenging” for the Series Mania team to pull together 2022’s program so soon after last year’s event, says general director Laurence Herszberg.However, it hasn’t been hard to attract projects to the festival. In a reflection of both Series Mania’s growing stature and the buoyant state of the scripted TV market, the event had 331 submissions from 46 different countries to the competition program.

Marta Balaga Ukrainian producer Julia Sinkevych, named main jury president at French TV festival Series Mania, is still hoping to come to Lille this week despite the ongoing war.“Last night, there was bombing not far from Lviv, so you never know. [Producer] Dariusz Jabłoński and the Polish Film Academy are helping out Ukrainian filmmakers and they will pick me up when I am in Poland,” she tells Variety during a conversation interrupted by a siren.“Usually, it means you have to hide.

Emiliano De Pablos Spain’s TV industry will make history at Series Mania Forum 2022, with its biggest panel and sneak peek series presentation presence ever at a major TV market. The Spanish conference attendance – alongside Finland’s panel spread – also weighs in as the biggest from any single country at the upcoming edition of the most important co-production event for scripted TV series in Europe.Series Mania Forum runs on-site over March 22-24 in Lille, northern France, under the larger Series Mania Festival umbrella.Organized by ICEX Spain Trade & Investment, the country’s export and inward investment board, the Spanish pavilion at the Lille Grand Palais will host a record-breaking delegation for Spain of around 20 companies and more than 50 executives. That’s a sign of just how much Series Mania has grown as an industry forum in the last few years, and of Spain’s ambition to ramp up exports of Spanish movies and TV content via a Spain AVS Hub plan whose total investment through 2025 is tabbed at $1.8 billion in state incentives and government-engineered financing.

Speakers Unveiled For Mip TV & Series Mania

Marta Balaga Dutch Features has acquired international rights to Finnish streaming service Elisa Viihde’s crime series “Evilside,” a six-hour Archipelago thriller set in the Oulu region of northern Finland.Filming took place from Dec. 2021 through Feb.

Holly Jones An idyllic private island retreat sees a set of estranged, longtime companions reunite after nearly 30 years of jobs and distance pulling them in opposite directions. Amidst the celebration, nefarious footage of a transgression against a female friend mysteriously resurfaces.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentMo Abudu, CEO of Nigeria’s The EbonyLife Group, will be celebrated by France’s upcoming Series Mania festival with its Women in Series Award. The prize, given in tandem with the European Women’s Audiovisual Network (EWA Network) and advocacy group Pour Les Femmes Dans Les Médias (PFDM), honors a remarkable woman from the audiovisual industry for her vision and leadership.

Pavlo Li on his U.S. IMDb page, was killed in the Ukranian city of Irpin on March 6, according to Ukranian journalist Sergiy Tomilenko and a post by the Odesa International Film Festival.More to come …

Denis Ivanov, the Ukrainian producer whose credits include films with Oleg Sentsov and Sergei Loznitsa, has penned an open letter while fighting on the front line of the war backing the proposed boycott of Russian cinema. Read it in full below.

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The Co-Founder of the Ukrainian Film Academy has been named Jury President for this year’s Series Mania.

HBO Max has unveiled the first trailer for “Julia,” an upcoming series about the life of beloved culinary icon Julia Child.Created by Daniel Goldfarb (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”), “Julia” focuses on Child (played in the series by Sarah Lancashire) during the years following the publication of her iconic cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The series sees Child kickstarting her first television series, “The French Chef,” at the public television station WGBH.

Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova will be seated with First Lady Jill Biden during President Joe Biden‘s first State of the Union address on Tuesday March 1. The ambassador will join the first lady along with the president’s sister Valerie Biden Owens and the Second Gentlman Douglas Emhoff. Oksana’s invitation to sit alongside Jill in the viewing box comes amid Ukraine’s battle with Russia, following an invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Find out everything you need to know about the 45-year-old ambassador here!