WRITTEN BY: Annika Pham
Cannes’s TV festival brought glamour and energy to a content market where some major players from the US, UK, Asia, and even the Nordics were notable absentees.
Wednesday evening was another high point for the Nordic region at Canneseries, with Norway receiving the coveted Best Series award as well as Best Music (to main composer Kåre Chr. Vestrheim) for NRK’s Power Play (Makta) - see our story/interviews: Power Play’s creators, director and main actress on NRK’s punky political drama.
The punky political drama inspired by the story of Norway’s first female Prime Minister and the internal power games within the Labour Party in the late 70s, conquered the jury of the 6th international drama festival, despite tough competition from nine high-end international shows, including DR’s Prisoner.
“We are sure the series will find a good audience internationally. The topics and history are very relevant when we look at the world we live in today,” pointed out REinvent’s sales and marketing director Helene Aurø.
Power Play was produced by Fremantle Group’s Norwegian label Novemberfilm together with pedigree company Motlys for NRK, in co-production with DR, Yle, SVT, RÚV, NDR, in association with Lumiere and support among others from Nordisk Film & TV Fond. The NRK premiere is set for this fall.
Last year the Norwegian series Afterglow won the High School Award-Best Series and Everything You Love the Student Award-Best Short Series.
Quieter but active MIPTV
While the TV drama festival attracted media attention and glitz and glamour associated to Cannes, the parallel content market MIPTV opened its doors between April 17-19 to 5,650 participants from 86 countries including 5,510 on-site industry delegates, up 1,000 from last year’s physical attendees, according to organisers RX France.
The group’s entertainment division director Lucy Smith cited a 22% increase of attendance from 2022, and confirmed that the next spring content market will be held April 15-17, 2024.
Despite RX France’s optimistic take, figures were definitely down from pre-Covid times (9,500 attendees in 2019), the usual advertising billboards in front of the Majestic Hotel or other prominent venues were absent this year, and professionals themselves, said many of their clients - mostly from the US, the UK, Asia - were not on hand.
Unlike its buzzy and busy twin-fall market MIPCOM, MIPTV has indeed suffered over the last few years, from a slowing down of activities, partly due to stronger competition from other content venues - the London Screenings, Series Mania, and high attendance costs. Adjustments due to macro-economic trends in the world and in particular in the audiovisual sector - with streamers lessening their orders or investing more cautiously, on top of travel cost-cutting post-Covid, were other reasons for a slowing down of this year’s spring market.
“MIPTV is getting smaller, we do have a lot less clients on site from certain territories, but it’s still the second biggest content market after MIPCOM, and we’ve had a packed booth all through the three-day market,” said Beta Film’s executive VP for the Nordics and Benelux Justus Riesenkampff.
Françoise Guyonnet, executive director TV series for Studiocanal concurred: “Yes we do regret the lack of clients from some territories - such as the US and Asia, but on the other hand, we’ve had non-stop traffic at Studiocanal,” she said.
Among Nordic sales companies, DR Sales’ Freja Johanne Nørgaard Sørensen also underlined that “MIPTV is slowing down”. But she was very pleased with the selection of DR Drama’s Prisoner at Canneseries main competition, which translated into intense activity at her sales booth, shared with SVT and Yle. “We’ve had full meetings across our formats, drama, kids, docs catalogue and for remakes", she said, while waiting for some confirmations to make sales announcements.
Yle Sales’ Maria Kivinen was pleased with the quieter market that gave more space for quality meeting. She announced a sale of Yle Drama’s spy thriller Stop Nyqvist to SBS for Australia, also in negotiations for the US.
On the documentary front, Kivinen stressed the excellent feedback from distributors to Prison Project-Little Scandinavia, winner of the ‘MIPDOC Buyers Coup de Coeur’. The documentary was pre-sold earlier to Topic for the US. Another hot property was Yellow Film & TV’s LGBTQ’s short format Limbo which attracted interest from France, the US, Germany and the Benelux.
REinvent’s sales and marketing director Helene Aurø was thrilled with the double win at Canneseries for NRK’s political drama Power Play and concluded: “We will continue to attend MIPTV as long as buyers come, perhaps with less people from our company. But we do need to meet our clients face to face and look forward to the next big market MIPCOM in the fall.”
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