Exclusive: Germany’s Nadcon and Benelux’s Lumiere are co-producers of the Finnish series produced by Vertigo for streaming service Elisa Viihde. Sky Vision handles world sales. 

The high-end drama thriller Bullets (10x45’) is created by producer Minna Virtanen with seasoned drama writer Antti Pesonen (Bordertown, Nymphs) who shares the writing credit with Matti Laine (Bordertown) and Kirsi Vikman (Mother of Mine). 


Director Antti Jokinen (Purge, The Resident) is reunited with actress Krista Kosonen (Purge, The Midwife) who plays one of the two main roles together with German actress Sibel Kekilli (Game of Thrones, Head-On).

Kosonen plays the exceptionally gifted undercover cop Mari Saari who has infiltrated the inner circle of a suicide bomber recruiter Madina Taburova (Kekilli), nicknamed the ‘black widow’. Mari unwittingly forms a kinship with Madina and soon finds her duties as a cop and her drive to protect Madina at war with each other. But everything is not as it seems. 

Ani Korpela, head of Content at Elisa Viihde said: “Bullets is an extremely valuable project for us and we are delighted to cooperate with internationally recognised talents. It's amazing to offer our customers a character-driven and twist-laden series with two strong female characters." 

Minna Virtanen told nordicfilmandtvnews.com: “Bullets is not the typical Nordic noir. It’s a mix of genres: a drama about broken families, a political drama, a police procedural as well as a spy thriller. We are very proud to be working with top European producers Lumiere, Nadcon  local distributors Elisa Viihde, MTV, as well as Sky Vision who will handle worldwide distribution outside Finland, Estonia and Benelux.”  The Finnish Film Foundation just granted production support to the show set to starts filming in November 2017 between Finland, Belgium and Georgia. The ’Elisa Viihde Original’ will premiere on the Finnish streaming service in the fall 2018 and after on the commercial channel MTV3.

Bullets will be German producer and long-time Nordic partner Peter Nadermann’s first foray into Finnish TV drama. He said: “Besides our strong investments in Sweden, Denmark and more and more in Norway, we feel that there is a new interesting scene developing in Finland. After my very successful collaborations with Aki and Mika Kaurismäki on the feature film side, Bullets is indeed or first Finnish drama series project. We’ve been working more than a year very successfully on the development of Bullets, which has become a very promising crime series project with a great cast and a talented director."

Sky Vision will start pitching Bullets to world buyers at MIPCOM in Cannes.