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Crime drama based on real-life events rarely delves into what happens after the case in question, but that is what the team behind buzzy Swedish series The Congregation: The Bride of Christ have done. The second season of the B-Reel Films-produced drama premieres at the ongoing Göteborg Film Festival where the crowd will see two installments.

The first season bowed on Swedish broadcaster TV4 in 2021. It dramatized a twisted murder mystery in the rural Swedish village of Knutby that involved a cult-like church congregation. The six-episode sophomore season drops on TV4 Play next month. It covers a part of the story about this congregation that isn’t as well known, even in Sweden, explains Johannes Åhlund, a Managing Partner at B-Reel and producer on both series of The Congregation.

“Most of the documentaries and articles on Knutby have covered up until the murder that ended Season 1 of [The Congregation], but we...

Exclusive: Swedish super-indie B-Reel Films has taken film and TV rights to ‘Jävla Karlar’ (‘Bloody Men’ in English), the award-winning novel from Andrev Walden.

‘Jävla Karlar’ took Sweden by storm when it was released in 2023. It was the country’s best selling book of the year and scooped the August Prize, which is Sweden’s top literary honor. Translation rights have been sold across Europe and the English-language version of the book will hit shelves next year.

Starting in 1983, the story follows a young boy who has a series of father figures coming and going in his life. His mother relays a fantastical story about his true father, a mysterious, long-haired figure living far away. It sparks the boy’s imagination to believe his father is the king of a magical land.

B-Reel is behind the upcoming Netflix action thriller The Helicopter Heist, based on the Jonas Bonnier novel about a daring real-life bank raid.

What if crisis-whammies Nordic drama producers would now tap into other European stories instead of staying in the Nordic bubble and self-sufficient eco-system of mixed national and regional private and public coin? Would it be payback time for European partners who until now have bought into the Nordic Noir, without some form of reciprocity?

The question was raised by Belgium producer Helen Perquy from Banijay Benelux’s Jonnydepony at this week’s Göteborg TV Drama Vision, at a panel which looked into the current Nordic drama production mayhem and possible solutions.

“In Belgium, we do have soft money, tax shelters, Vaf [Flanders Audiovisual Fund], Screen Flanders but you guys in the Nordics have had way more money from broadcasters and global streamers, while we’ve had to be creative [with our financing],” said Perquy.

“For years we’ve watched your series and films, they’ve been up there,” noted the producer, raising her arm up in the air.

Crime shows look for a new angle, argued Berlinale Series participants on Monday.

There is no shortage of new offerings, from Berlinale Market Selects’ “Two Sides of the Abyss,” Serbia’s “The Fall” or South Africa’s “Donkerbos,” created by Nico Scheepers, to China’s melancholic, decades-spanning “Why Try to Change Me Now,” with Golden Bear winner Yinan Diao attached as executive producer.

But while there is still an appetite for traditional detective stories, producers and broadcasters are venturing out of the “damaged, middle-aged white detective slot on a Sunday night,” suggested All3Media International’s Rachel Glaister. They are also thinking about their younger audience.

“[‘The Gymnasts’] wasn’t born as a pure crime show. We were also attracted by other themes, including coming-of-age,” said Carlotta Claori of Indigo Film when discussing the series about a tournament in the Italian Alps, gone horribly wrong.

With “The Gymnasts” adding a female detective, absent...

Cannes — TV series “Agatha Christie’s Hjerson” has been picked up by streamer Topic for North America and by the Australian channel Sbs, Zdf Studios announced Tuesday at Cannes Mipcom trade fair.

“Agatha Christie’s Hjerson” is being sold as both a 45-minute series and four feature-length stories.

Topic has taken exclusive rights for the U.S. and Canada. Sbs, a multicultural Australian broadcaster, has also closed an exclusive deal for the drama series.

Additionally, Zdf Studios has licensed the program to VOD platforms Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, Deutsche Telekom and Huawei for German speaking territories, as well as Germany’s public broadcaster, Zdf.

Other buyers include Viasat World, which covers the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Croatia and the whole of Southeast Europe, Keshet (Israel), Nhk (Japan), VR Films (India), Lrt (Lithuania) and Walter Presents, Walter Iuzzolino’s Global Series Network for the U.K. and Ireland.

“I’m delighted that this excellent drama,...

B-Reel Films, the Swedish banner behind “Midsommar,” is set to produce a thriller series based on Jonas Bonnier’s true crime novel “The Helicopter Heist,” and has attached Ronnie Sandahl (“Borg vs McEnroe”) as creator and writer.

Boasting offices in Stockholm and Los Angeles, B-Reel has secured the rights to the popular novel from Swedish literary agency Salomonsson, and is adapting it into an eight-episode, character-driven suspense series. Rights to the novel were previously acquired by Jake Gyllenhaal’s Nine Stories banner in 2016, where it was being developed as a feature, but the project fell through.

The plot is based on the true story of four young Swedes who orchestrated the one of the most spectacular daylight heists of all time in 2009 and used a stolen Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopter to land on the roof of a G4S cash service depot building in in Stockholm. They stole more than 4 million in cash.

In today’s Global Bulletin, “Agatha Christie’s Sven Hjerson” takes top honors at MipTV’s MipDrama; ScreenSkills launches an ambitious unscripted training program in the U.K.; San Sebastian opens the call for its Europe-Latin America co-production forum; We Are Parable plans 18 months of events to celebrate Black filmmakers in the U.K.; WarnerMedia commits to Sam Mendes’ Theatre Artist Fund; Channel 5 announces four new historical unscripted specials; and NewImages Festival, Cannes Xr and Tribeca Festival create XR3, a virtual exhibition for VR content.

Markets

MipTV’s MipDrama sidebar has awarded Be-Reel Films’ “Agatha Christie’s Sven Hjerson” with the coveted MIPDrama – Buyers’ Coup de Cœur, the most prestigious prize at the annual Cannes-based market.

In the show, Hanna Alström plays Klara Sandberg, a former TV producer pitching a true-life crime show starring Sven Hjerson — an updated real-life version of the popular character from Agatha Christie’s oeuvre...

Few titles which will have been presented at this Friday’s MipDrama look as ingenious in their invention as “Agatha Christie’s Hjerson.”

Anyone looking for a series of novels in the Poirot or Marple vein will look in vain. Sven Hjerson appears in multiple Christie works, but always via (often disparaging) comments made by his creator, fictional crime novelist Ariadne Oliver, a friend of Poirot’s whom Christie invented to let off steam about the travails of crime writing.

Despite being her most popular detective, Oliver would like to kill him off, she says. That’s because she’s made him a foreigner and receives letters from readers complaining about the inaccuracy of her descriptions of him: a fate suffered by Christie with Poirot.

Many decades later, Oliver must be rolling in her grave. Her master sleuth Sven Hjerson has now become the protagonist of an eight-part TV series...

Sven Hjerson, the debonair Scandinavian master detective invented by crime writer Ariadne Oliver, a character in Agatha Christie’s novels, will get his own series, set in modern-day Stockholm.

In “Agatha Christie’s Sven Hjerson,” Hanna Alström plays Klara Sandberg, a former trash TV producer who successfully pitches a true-life crime show starring Hjerson, who would solve a real crime each week. The new show may reset Sandberg’s career and life, but the only problem is that she has never met Hjerson.

The show stars Johan Rheborg (“Kenny Starfighter”) as Hjerson. It will be comprised of four murder cases and broadcast as four films and an eight-episode TV series in the fall of 2021.

“The series will offer mystery, drama, puzzles; it’s not a comedy but will have a sense of humor and be a world that’s quite nice just to be in,” said Josefine Tengblad, head of...

While most of the world is on lockdown mode, Sweden has taken a different route, with schools, restaurants, some theaters and most public venues still open.

The Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, has asked people to behave like “adults” and not give in to the panic, advising them to work from home, as well as banning gatherings of more than 50 people. But Löfven has not imposed drastic restrictions in Sweden as in other countries in Europe, such as its Nordic neighbors in Finland and Denmark, or France, Italy, Spain, and more recently the U.K.

Many movie theaters in Sweden are closed but some have remained open, notably theaters run by Svenska Bio, Sweden’s second biggest cinema chain, which also operates in Finland and Denmark.

Peter Fornstam, the CEO of Svenska Bio, said the group has kept theaters open in Sweden but with super low attendance and a cap of 50 admissions per auditorium.