The Ink Factory & Amusement Park Adapting The Eighth Life

The Ink Factory (The Night Manager, The Little Drummer Girl) and Amusement Park (All Quiet on the Western Front, Munich Games) have teamed up to produce a series adaptation of the international bestseller The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili.

Fusing music, dance and the great tides of the Red Century, The Eighth Life is a mythic tale that follows its courageous characters across time and place as they fight for freedom: from ancient, mountainous cave cities to the turbulent streets of Tbilisi, from Soviet Russia to revolutionary Prague and 1960s Soho.

Sarah Lambert (The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, The Messenger) is attached as showrunner for The Eighth Life, which has been envisioned as a returning, English-language series.

The project has been awarded a funding grant from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

Simon Cornwell and Stephen Cornwell, co-CEOs and founders of The Ink Factory, said: “Nino Haratischvili’s book is timely, powerful and remarkable, and we are honored to have the opportunity to adapt it, together with our illustrious colleagues at Amusement Park and the multi-talented Sarah Lambert. A metaphor for our own lives and described as a War and Peace for the 21st century, The Eighth Life is a 1,000-page masterpiece full of pain, joy and romance, and it has already established itself as one of the great works of literature of the last 50 years. We are grateful to the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg for their faith in this project and their shared vision of its extraordinary potential.”

Malte Grunert and Amelie von Kienlin, partners in Amusement Park, said: “The Eighth Life is a bold, emotional and sovereign piece of literature that gives a strong voice to the women of that era, and indeed of the present day. It screams to be adapted into a series. We are incredibly excited to become part of this ambitious project and to be partnering with our long-time collaborators at The Ink Factory and the outstanding showrunner Sarah Lambert.”

Lambert said: “Nino Haratischvili’s brilliant novel is an utterly compelling and emotionally powerful story of one family navigating the sweeping tides of Georgia’s tumultuous history. The Eighth Life cast a spell over me, gripped me from beginning to end, with its extraordinary cast of characters and unique female lens on the Red Century. I’m so thrilled to be working alongside Nino and the fabulous creative teams at The Ink Factory and Amusement Park to bring this epic story to audiences around the world.”

Haratischvili said: “I am incredibly excited and grateful that The Eighth Life will be brought to another life by these wonderful people. I can’t wait to meet my characters on screen. It’s a wonderful odyssey that I’ve been looking forward to for so long, and the fact that it’s now starting to take shape, that the great Sarah is taking on the book to translate it into another medium, makes me look forward to the future with hope and joy.”