The fast-rising Swedish production company has three high end TV dramas in development.

Nexiko also starts filming in May a new Robert Gustafsson feature comedy. CEO Lars Beckung spoke to us.

Who runs Nexiko and what is your company’s DNA?
Lars Beckung: The company was founded four years ago. I used to work at Kanal 5 Discovery Networks Sweden as Director of Programmes and wanted to do something else. TV personalities Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson who were also at Kanal 5 felt the same and together with Mikael Svensson [formerly at Metronome] we decided to set up shop. Our company was initially called Mexiko Media, but US industry people couldn’t understand why we Swedes had a company with such a name, so we changed it to Nexiko. Our idea was to work on a global strategy and focus on drama, digital and geographical expansion. We have opened an office in Sweden and in Norway and are on the verge of opening a branch in the US.

Who runs the Norwegian office?
LB: Kristian Westgaard is CEO and the creative director/Head of Content is Jens Bull. Our intention is to produce Norwegian content and to co-produce with Sweden.

Are you targeting a specific genre?
LB: We create storytelling based on real life stories. Our successful documentary film Nice People [Trevlig folk] is typical of what we want to do, which is to use entertainment and comedy to reach people’s hearts and minds. Many of our projects are also traditional character-driven dramas. We’re happy to set the stories within different genres-crime, horror, comedy - and turn them into something ground-breaking.

How do you initiate projects and how big is your development team?
LB: Our ideas come from different sources as we don’t have a catalogue or a line-up of IPs. We work with third parties and have three producers in-house: Martin Söder (formerly at Eyeworks Warner Sweden), Mikael R. Hylin and Tomas Axelsson. We have great relationships across the Nordics with talents and financiers.

We are in a very interesting phase because we have a lot of material in development and will start production in May of our first scripted feature film Tårtgeneralen (lit. The cake general) which is Filip & Fredrik’s feature film debut.

Is it based on an original idea?
L.B.: You were asking about genres, and this is a typical example of what we want to do. It’s based on the true story of a guy from the small town of Köping which is also Filip’s birthplace. In 1984 the city was voted in a TV show the most boring city in Sweden. Even an Ikea shop closed which is never heard of! The town needed something to happen. Then a local entrepreneur, ‘Hasse P’- decided to make the biggest sandwich cake in the world to get Köping in the Guinness book of records. Filip & Fredrik wrote a book about this in 2008 and the film is based on it. Filip and Fredrik have great empathy for eccentrics or ‘normal’ people with extraordinary stories hungry for change. The film is a declaration of love to those oddballs, but also to small town communities. It will be a feel-good movie with a socio-political layer.

Who is in the cast and who are your financial partners?
LB: Robert Gustafsson [The 100 Year-Old Man who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared] has the main role and we will announce the rest of the cast closer to filming in May. SF Studios is our distributor, SVT is on board and we received support from the Swedish Film Institute. The full budget is around SEK 35m (€3.6m). SF Studios International handles world sales.

What TV dramas are in your pipeline?
LB: We have several projects at different stages of development and three  were pitched in Göteborg.

  • Family Affair was initiated by Oskar Söderlund [The Fat & the Angry]. It is co-written by the Dane Mikkel Bak Sørensen (Limbo). I saw The Fat & the Angry, loved the dialogue and felt there was something missing in Scandi drama so I contacted Oskar. It’s the story of Sandra, a young woman at a top business school in Göteborg. She believes her father imports cucumber from Holland, but it turns out to be drugs. She’s forced into the business but gradually starts liking it. There is a parallel between the business world and criminal world and what short cuts you’re prepared to take to reach your goal.
    We have interest from SVT and hope to attract foreign investors. Hopefully we will finish the script this year and go into production next year.
  • Imprint is a great project that actress/writer Moa Gammel [Jordskott] and advertising creative director/writer Zeke Tastas pitched to us. Zeke loves horror movie! We felt it was a perfect fit for our slate and it follows the Swedish tradition with hits such as Let the right one in and Lights Out. It’s horror with a strong crime element, set in a dystopian future. Two neuroscientists from a prestigious university push themselves into a ruthless serial killer’s universe to prove the true nature of ghosts. We don’t have a host broadcaster yet, but have started pitching it in the US and in Europe to studios and indies. We’re getting very strong responses.

What range of budget do you have in mind?
LB: Both series are slightly above the average (€1 million per episode) but it will depend on who gets on board. Family Affair will be more traditional, shot mostly in Swedish and set in Göteborg, although it will have international appeal in terms of distribution. Imprint will be shot organically in different languages. We have a strong vision for the show but want to remain flexible in terms of how the vision can be achieved.

We have a third TV project that we pitched in Göteborg: No Man starring Mikael Persbrandt. Showrunner Mikael Hylin who knows Mikael wrote the role for him. Mikael plays a police officer trying to recover from drug addiction. He gets a new identity, changes city and joins the ‘No Man group’, an elite force operating under Europol that fights human trafficking and chaos created in the wake of the refugee crisis. We did a lot of research and found out that many refugees go missing in the system, not only because of red tape errors but also because of criminal involvement and human trafficking.

Although your company is quite new, do you feel broadcasters and investors are more willing today to take risks at script stage because of the stiff competition on the market?
LB: Indeed, there are many new players, and everyone –in the Nordics and internationally-is looking for original content with a twist, projects that seem to fit specific niches but have a cross over potential such as Strange Things, or OA that are hits on Netflix. So yes, we’re attracting a lot of attention at development stage and taking our time to bring the projects to the right partners.