“Gold,” a standout Berlinale Series Market project, has scored an invite to next month’s Series Mania Forum, the industry arm of Europe’s biggest TV festival.
The announcement was made Tuesday after Berlin’s Co-Pro Series Pitch session where “Gold” was unveiled by producer Stefan Eichenberger at Zurich-based Contrast Film, one of Switzerland’s biggest production companies whose “Davos 1917”, was also pitched at the Co-Pro Series, in 2019. It went on to become the biggest TV production ever made in Switzerland, a co-production between Contrast Film and Germany’s Letterbox Produktion.
An equally ambitious, large-scale series exposé of the gold trade, raging from Switzerland to the Persian Gulf and Africa, thriller “Gold,” a miniseries in early development, lifts the lid on the gold trade. Social issue and character driven, events are steered by Swiss gold trader Hannah who, with her company teetering towards collapse, turns to illicit trading.
An eye-opening tragic accident in Africa pushes her, however, to rebel against the very system of gross exploitation which has made her powerful.
The biggest premium play at Tuesday’s Co-Pro Series Pitch, “Gold” is being written by “Tschugger” scribes Christian Wehrlin and Pascal Glatz, Jessica Hagan, a prize-winning Ghanaian-British playwright and creator of the Series Mania-selected “Coup,” and Mariama Djité (“Unsere kleine Botschaft”).
“We chose the project ‘Gold’ to reveal that behind everything that shines, there is suffering. The characters’ moral dilemmas and the questions they raise are the essential ingredients of a powerful series, an ambitious global thriller,” said Laurence Herszberg, Series Mania founder and general manager, who presented the invite along with Series Mania Forum director Francesco Capurro in the presence of Martina Bleis, head of Berlinale Co-Production Market.
Flipping the welcome, the Berlinale Series Market also invited a project from Series Mania, “Antiparos,” created and directed by Alexandros Tsilifonis, which has been boarded by former Buccaneer Media exec Richard Tulk-Hart in news announced at the Berlinale Series Market.
“The series stands apart by placing a noir mystery in bright, familiar terrain and slowly draining the color from it, until questions of duty, family loyalty, and justice collide,” he told Variety. “It is ultimately about what we owe the place that raised us, and how far we are willing to go to protect it.”