Seriesly Berlin Picks 18 Projects For September Pitch
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Seriesly Berlin picked 18 projects from over 250 submissions for its pitching competition at Fotografiska Berlin on September 15-16, split into three strands — Writers' Pitch (early-stage), Co-Production Pitch (advanced), and a new Vertical Drama category.
- The seven-title Co-Production Pitch includes Have You Seen Sabine? (an Australia-Germany cold-case series about a 2005 backpacker murder), a Latvian Cold War thriller about surgeon Viktors Kalnbērzs (The Man Behind a Mask), Robert Wilson's Portugal-set novel adaptation Small Death in Lisbon, and Italian padel dramedy Vamos.
- The Writers' Pitch fields eight projects including Black Valley (co-written by Star Trek: Discovery's Ted Sullivan), two German entries tackling far-right violence — The Verdict (a Chemnitz-set defence attorney drama) and The Baseball Bat Years (a neo-Nazi thriller spanning 1992 to 2022) — plus a Berlin-set Israeli-Palestinian musical drama called Hands Up.
- The new Vertical Drama Pitch launches with four entries: France's 30-part romcom-thriller Deep Fake, Germany's 50-part social thriller What We See (about a public reaching a verdict before investigators), and a 28-episode Argentinian-German-Spanish stepsibling comedy, Worth to Know.
- The Co-Production Pitch winner receives an in-kind €25,000 ($30,000) colour-grading package from new partner Cine Chromatix; the SteinbrennerMüller Award returns with a €2,000 communications concept for one German-language project from the Co-Pro or Writers' Pitch.
- Festival director Dennis Ruh said selecting from more than 250 submissions was 'anything but easy,' noting creators 'are responding to political and social realities' but 'doing so through deeply personal stories' with 'plenty of humour and optimism.'
Why it matters: For independent creators across at least a dozen countries, the reformatting into three pitching strands — including a new Vertical Drama lane — adds more targeted pitching slots to match project development stage, with concrete financial upside via the €25,000 Cine Chromatix post-production prize and the SteinbrennerMüller communications award.
Ask SkimNews
