MIA Director Gaia Tridente Reveals Sony Pictures TV Exec Katherine Pope Among Keynote Speakers as Rome Market Projects Are Unveiled (EXCLUSIVE)
Italy’s MIA market — dedicated to international TV series, animation, feature films and documentaries — is set for its 10th edition with 60 projects from 90 countries ready to be unveiled to potential partners.
The Oct. 14-18 pre-Mipcom event will also feature a rich roster of panels and keynote speakers, which will help take the global industry’s pulse at a time when business models are changing and co-productions have become more crucial than ever.
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This year’s MIA panels will be announced later this week, but market director Gaia Tridente revealed to Variety that she has lined up some high-caliber keynote speakers such as Sony Pictures Television Studios president Katherine Pope, “Ripley” producer Clayton Townsend and Canadian-American producer Odessa Rae, who was instrumental in the making of Oscar-winning doc “Navalny” about the late Russian dissident.
Tridente said she’s been surprised at how many projects MIA received this year – 600 submissions to its co-productions call, as opposed to roughly 500 last year. This means that “there are a lot of producers who are working hard on developing new stories,” she noted, just as “streamers are making different kinds of investments” and “producers are asking to retain more rights for their shows.” This scenario makes new forms of co-productions “a good basis for securing bigger budgets,” she went on to point out.
The boutique event is celebrating its first decade by continuing to adapt its new market concept to ongoing industry changes, which was underlined in a statement from Chiara Sbarigia, the president of APA (Italy’s Audiovisual Producers Association).
“MIA and specifically APA, which I chair, have always sought to attract top international professionals in the industry – both producers and commissioners – to learn and discuss the most innovative trends in scripted series, in terms of both content and format,” Sbarigia said. “This continues to be our vision; to attract producers and expand what the Italian industry has to offer.”
Francesco Rutelli, who is the outgoing president of Italy’s motion picture association ANICA, said MIA’s good health on its 10-year anniversary “demonstrates at least two things: that in Italy there was space to create a B2B event for the entire audiovisual sector – a project that not everyone believed in at the time but that ANICA strongly wanted,” and one that “sees Rome as its chosen venue.” Rutelli also praised MIA for proving that “a flexible model that transforms and adapts is the right formula for a market in a perpetually evolving industry,” noting that “over the past 10 years, an industrial revolution has occurred.”
Tridente pointed out how more than 100 projects launched at MIA over the past 10 years have made it to the screen, citing Swiss producer Jean-Marc Fr?hle’s period drama “Winter Palace” that will soon be dropping on Netflix. Another high-profile show that got traction after its MIA pitch is the series “Miss Fallaci,” about the 1958 journey to the U.S. of iconic Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. The show is the first Italian original produced for Paramount Plus and will launch from the Rome Film Festival this month.
The 14 TV series from 12 countries being pitched at MIA include U.S.-Japan co-prod “The Aosawa Murders,” based on Riku Onda’s book about the 1973 murder of 17 people who consumed poisoned sake and soft drinks that were delivered as a gift to the rich Aosawa family. Takeo Kodera from Kadokawa Corporation and former Sierra/Affinity president Jonathan Kier’s L.A.-based Upgrade Productions are producing the show.
Being pitched from the U.K. is “Castle of the Eagles,” a series about the escape of several Allied Forces generals from a prison camp set up by Benito Mussolini in a Tuscan castle. The show, based on a book by Mark Felton, is penned by Oscar-nominated scribe Jeff Pope (“Philomena”) and produced by industry veteran Xavier Marchand, whose credits include “Spotlight.”
Another standout series project at MIA is “Bat Out of Hell,” which will portray legendary Canadian Formula 1 driver Gilles Villeneuve and is written by “Blackberry” filmmakers Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller and produced via their Zapruder Films.
Feature films seeking partners at MIA include “Fish,” a Venice-set fantasy directed by Carlo S. Hintermann, whose debut film “The Book of Vision” opened the Venice Critics’ Week in 2020; and Sicily-set coming-of-age drama “The Place of Eternal Summer,” which is the directorial debut of ace Italian screenwriter Maddalena Ravagli (“Gomorrah”).
The rich selection of animation projects on display includes “Gainsbourg: Rue De Verneuil,” a film about the life of French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. “Gainsbourg” is produced by France’s Logical Pictures and its The Jokers Lab distribution outfit.
Docs being proposed include a trio of climate-related projects: “Black Carbon-Native Science,” about discoveries made by an Inuit scientist regarding damages caused by microplastics in the ice of Greenland; “Inferno – Climate Crisis in the Mediterranean”; and “Seveso – The Italian Chernobyl,” the latter of which is produced by Italy’s Fandango.
Pictured above (from left to right): Francesco Rutelli, Gaia Tridente, Chiara Sbarigia
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