On the evening of Tuesday March 21, while inside the room, packed, of the New Century, in Old Lille, the team of The Fortress presented this apocalyptic Norwegian series, demonstrators opposed to pension reform tried to walk the red carpet of the Series Mania festival.
The day before, the Vidocq award ceremony, awarded to the best detective series (E-syndrome, this year) by a jury of law enforcement professionals, under the patronage of the regional prefect, had been disturbed by activists who perhaps also wanted to recall that Vidocq was not only a police officer.
This Tuesday also marked the opening of the Series Mania Forum, the professional side of the festival. 3,800 participants were expected for the 2023 edition of this event, which is part market, part co-production workshop and part think tank. Among the rituals that punctuate the Forum are five sessions entitled “Coming Next From” (“expected from…”, English being naturally the lingua franca of the Forum), during which five countries – this year, France, Spain, Germany, Finland and, for Canada, Quebec – each present five series that are arriving on the international market.
Engage investors
The Spanish and French selections were not lacking in interest. Of course, these are not representative samples of increasingly plethoric national productions (in 2022, 70 new series were born in Spain, while in France, where we count in hours, we produced 1,281 in 2021), but from a handful of projects to catch the eye of investors.
Spain, which Polseres vermelles (the original, Catalan version of the red wristbands) To Money Heist has become a great power in the field of series, offered among other things the first episodic adaptation of a novel by Almudena Grandes, the prolific chronicler of the Civil War and its aftermath, The Patients of Doctor Garcia (2017, published by JC Lattès in 2020). We can not predict the success or not of a project whose trailer and making of testify to the opulence. The Patients of Doctor Garcia has the particularity of having been co-produced by national television TVE and Netflix, which ensured its distribution abroad, except in France and Italy, which testifies to the gradual relaxation of the influence of the platforms on the works they broadcast.
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