Event Preview: Series Mania Festival & the Co-Production Forum

The eighth edition of Series Mania Festival, organized by the Forum des images, is being held in France from April 13 to 23, and this year is gearing up to be its largest and most ambitious event yet.

Around 60 brand-new TV series and some 20 digital shows are set to be unveiled at the festival, which draws a diverse range of attendees from around the world.

“In eight years, Series Mania has become known as an international event,” says Laurence Herszberg, the director of Forum des images and founder of the Series Mania Festival. “It’s a relatively short period of time, especially for what it takes to build up an international reputation.” And Series Mania has done just that, positioning itself as a must-attend event for participants from all corners of the globe.

Herszberg says that the upcoming April event will signify a “major move forward” both in terms of the Series Mania Festival and the professional arm, Series Mania Co-Production Forum. Following the success of the 2016 edition, the Co-Production Forum has been extended to four days (from three), running April 18 to 21. The call for projects to take part in the event is open until February 17.

“For the last edition, we received 209 projects and we selected 15,” Herszberg explains. “This year, with the reputation of the Series Mania Co-Production Forum getting bigger, and with the announcement of a 50,000 euros prize going to the producer of the best project, we are expecting even more entries to come.”

She says that even with the higher volume of submissions expected, the event is keeping the selection pool at 16. Herszberg believes that this is a manageable number, meant to ensure that all projects are high quality and that participants have the opportunity to discuss each one in-depth. The 16 selected series in development will be presented to an audience of 400 international industry executives. A jury will choose their favorite project and the producer will be awarded 50,000 euros to help with the development.

Special attention and effort have been placed on helping the producers prepare for the pitching sessions as well. “In the beginning, we were not really focusing on how the projects were presented,” Herszberg says. “After a year, we realized that [the pitching] has to be an event by itself. Pitching is something that you have to learn. It’s not enough just to have a good project; you have to know how to pitch it. You have to get the attention of around 500 people and you have eight minutes to do it and make them say, Wow! This project is really great!”

Selecting the projects to take part in the Co-Production Forum has gotten harder every year for Herszberg and her team. When the event first began, it mainly attracted small- to mid-sized companies and mostly European broadcasters. Now, attendance has grown to include major studios, large international companies and broadcasters that are heavy-hitters in the global market. So, from a time when selecting eight “edgy” projects was the goal, now it’s also about “big projects for the general public,” Herszberg says. “You have to provide to all the attendees what they are looking for—a Danish broadcaster that would like to have something edgy, a French broadcaster that would like to have something big, an American one who would like to have something to replace a procedural, etc.”

And the lineup of attendees has, indeed, become quite diverse. Herszberg notes that more U.S. studios are now heading out to the Co-Production Forum. “They know that everyone from the international industry will be attending. They know that fresher stories will come out of these meetings.”

“We had 26 countries represented in the Co-Production Forum,” she adds. “I think that now for the Co-Production Forum we have almost everyone from all the countries interested [in international co-production]. Where we have to make major steps is Asia. It’s still difficult to get Japanese or Korean producers or broadcasters to come to the event; they are not that open to international co-production. Europe is represented in a very large sense, and so is Israel. Netflix and all the other digital platforms are as well. Argentina, which is now a major country in producing TV shows, comes to Series Mania. It’s very interesting to see that this Co-Production Forum, which started on a small scale, is now becoming the event for networking, discussing projects and having time in a friendly environment to do some business.”

The Co-Production Forum is also about networking in an informal and friendly environment, a key element provided by Series Mania as an international gathering on a human scale. “Paris provides the participants with a great number of opportunities for entertainment (the Seine River, the Eiffel Tower, hidden places that few people know about, and excellent cuisine). We also want to keep our event affordable to anyone in the industry knowing that good projects also come from independent companies and talent.”

A new initiative this year is the creation of the first Series Lab. “We really think that in the future everything will be about content,” Herszberg says. “The key in the TV-series business is content. Everybody is looking to make a difference by proposing the best content; it can be about innovation or being edgy, going down a classic track or gathering a large audience. We all know that there is no recipe to achieve a good show, and there are not so many scriptwriters who can deliver a ten-episode series that will make the difference. In that framework, training is essential. That’s why we launched the first Series Lab, in co-production with the TorinoFilmLab, who know about how to train cinema scriptwriters.” There are going to be three sessions: one in Italy, one in Spain and one in France just before Series Mania. A total of 109 projects were received for the Series Lab this year; nine were selected. The people behind the selections are going to be trained through the Series Lab and the resulting projects are going to be pitched for the first time during the next edition of Series Mania.

An official competition for world premieres was introduced for the Series Mania Festival in 2016, and this year it is being expanded to include 12 series (building on the eight from the last edition). A jury of five internationally renowned stars of the small screen will award the Series Mania Grand Prix and Special Jury Prize. Herszberg says that launching a competition for international premieres wasn’t as easy as one might think. “Broadcasters, in the general sense of the term, still have cold feet about exposing their shows before the national broadcast,” she says. “This is very typical in the cinema business—where everyone wants to be selected for Cannes, for instance—but it’s still unfamiliar to the TV-series industry. It still takes time and energy to convince everyone that it’s worth having their TV shows in an international competition at Series Mania.”

Herszberg is confident that the series business will catch on though, once they realize what this exposure can do for a program. For example, the Argentinian series El Marginal won the top prize last year by a jury that was led by The Sopranos creator David Chase. A sales executive from Dori Media, which represents El Marginal in the international marketplace, told Herszberg that after the prize went public, her phone was ringing off the hook and her email inbox was fuller than ever.

“That’s exactly what we want to hear and what we are trying to achieve,” Herszberg says. “It’s not just about creating a competition; it has to help the industry—and that’s what this festival is for.”