More than 900 professionals and 20.000 visitors are expected at the 7th Series Mania TV Drama Festival that opens today in Paris. Twelve Nordic productions have been selected, double compared to last year. We spoke to General Director Laurence Herszberg (pictured).

Some people say that Series Mania is to TV Drama what the Cannes Film Festival is to film, in terms of prestige. Do you agree?Laurence Herszberg: There is just one Cannes Film Festival. That said, we are facing tougher competition from Toronto, Berlin, Tribeca. What we are trying to do is build our festival as a reference event for TV drama, open for the general audience and the industry (unlike MIPTV, C21 Screenings) and a must event for European professionals. 

We know that European TV drama travels extremely well. The trend started with the Nordic dramas The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen. These were benchmark series in the export of foreign language European TV drama. Today, Netflix invests in original local drama and more and more US players attend Series Mania. Two reasons are behind this interest: they look for different stories and ways of telling stories, they want to establish their presence in local markets. 

The Forum of Co-productions is a very popular event. How do you deal with the growing number of projects submitted and professionals wanting to attend?
LH: At the beginning, we wanted the Forum to stay small and intimate. We didn’t want a big market like MIPTV or MIPCOM, but a friendly working environment. We started with a screening room for 300 people for the pitches. But now, due to the demand from producers, broadcasters, major players, we’ve had to move to a 500 seat screening room.
We are faced with similar challenges regarding the co-production projects. More and more mainstream series are submitted from a wider number of countries. We wanted to keep the number of selected projects to 15 to focus on premium quality. So we had to cut down from 191 to 75, then from 75 to 30, and finally from 30 to 15! That was devastating for us as we could easily have selected 30 projects. We might have to widen the selection next year. 

One of this year’s highlights is the new World Premieres International competition. What are the trends across the line up?
Laurence Herszberg: All the series are going to illustrate the great diversity and range of genres, from fantasy with Beau séjour from Belgium, societal drama with Cannabis from France, thriller and crime, that remain pivotal in drama, with Midnight Sun (rooted in Nordic noir with a strong French flavor), The Five from the UK, Mama’s Angel, from Israel. You have as well Australia’s The Kettering Incident with its Twin Peaks universe and of course the gripping Norwegian thriller Nobel. The opening scene in particular can easily be compared to top US war movies such as Kathlyn Bigelow s’ Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker.
Midnight Sun’s opening scene as well is absolutely amazing. I’m dying to see the entire series!

There is an increasing number of co-productions, put together for financial reasons -to raise the budgets - and for creative reasons, because the subjects lend themselves to multi-territory partnerships and create true organic, natural collaborations. Both Midnight Sun (French/Swedish) and Cannabis (French/Spanish) are perfect examples of such organic co-productions. The Norwegian show Occupied co-produced y Arte was slightly less of an organic co-production. 

As the audience is increasingly hungry for TV series set in exotic settings, shot in a foreign language, these co-productions become natural. 

Scandinavian TV drama remains at the heart of your programming and this year you have doubled the number of shows. That must be a positive sign …
LH: The Nordic region, one of the oldest in TV drama production, remains at the top end in terms of quality, with British drama. Perhaps producers should be careful not to saturate audiences with Nordic crime, but still, quality remains at the highest level, and Nordic writers and talents travel much more.

The highpoint of the Co-production Forum is the European TV Series Co-production Day on April 20. What will be the main topics?
LH: We will discuss financing ambitious series, the development of OTT services and thematic channels and their impact on the distribution of European content, and the remake of European series, with HBO Europe’s experience with the Norwegian show Mammon. Finally nurturing European talents will be the topic of the closing round table. 

This subject is probably the most urgent to tackle: we don’t need more public money for co-productions but we do need more public money for script development in Europe. We also need similar initiatives to Cinéfondation in Cannes, training ground and residences for tomorrow’s top European screenwriters.