STUDIOCANAL Sets Up Production Venture with The Killing & Borgen Creators

PARIS: STUDIOCANAL, CANAL+ Group and the writers and creators Søren Sveistrup (The Killing) and Adam Price (Borgen), along with producer Meta Louise Foldager, have formed a new production company, SAM Productions.

STUDIOCANAL joins as partner and will serve as the company's distributor. Foldager serves as partner, CEO and executive producer. Sveistrup and Price are partners and executive producers; they also join as creators of and writers on their own new TV series. CANAL+ Group will work with SAM to develop premium content for its channels.

The operation is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Olivier Courson, STUDIOCANAL's chairman and CEO, said: “SAM is meeting STUDIOCANAL’s ambitions to develop TV series and strengthen our relationships with Scandinavian talents. We’ve already been working with Tomas Alfredson, Susanne Bier and Tobias Lindholm on feature films.

“It is a great pleasure to work now with Adam, Søren and Meta and hopefully many other talents. SAM can become a great creative platform with very complementary shareholders, and we have great ambitions for this nice venture.”

Sveistrup said: “I am excited to get started. With SAM, we have got a unique creative and ambitious platform I expect a lot from. I hope that we will attract a lot of talent and passion—and that we will create the best possible framework for creators in the North. Scandinavia has its own tradition of storytelling. SAM will take up this tradition but also challenge the conventions and create something that constantly challenges the audience and ourselves.”

Price commented: ”The modern TV-series is going through a golden period and it is great to find that also Nordic TV series—not least Danish TV series—enjoy great success in many countries outside Scandinavia. The Killing and Borgen have both been a part of this development—and to us, it seems to be a natural next step to create this new screenwriter–based company, founded on the ambition of creating new stories to a large audience both in Denmark and abroad. The Nordic stories in many different genres, have been noticed around the world. We need to retain and invest in this position; with SAM we want to collaborate with some of the strongest talent in the Nordic countries. We want to create the best conditions and a unique creative environment, so that we keep getting better at telling relevant and powerful stories.”

Foldager explained: ”In Scandinavia, we have a huge pool of extremely strong writing and directing talents, who have told striking stories in movies and TV series, successfully distributed worldwide. In order to facilitate and nurse this very fortunate talent situation, we need to finance, collaborate and distribute internationally. SAM has the ambition, structure and a group of owners that in my view, make a solid platform for doing so.”