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With Baltic shows growing bigger and bolder and producers looking for more international collaborators, local creators reach for original stories and established IPs, delivering period dramas and timely satires. However, crime shows, whether contemporary – like this year’s Berlinale Series Market Selects “My Dear Mother” – or set in the 19th century, still take the crown. Or at least the top hat.

“Melchior the Apothecary”

Creators: Indrek Hargla, Elmo Nüganen, Olle Mirme

Director: Elmo Nüganen

Based on popular crime series books by Indrek Hargla – about an apothecary who heals the sick and solves mysteries – the show is set in medieval Tallinn. Shot as a trilogy, which was a box-office success in Estonia, it’s sold by Global Screen as a miniseries. It features Märten Metsaviir and Maarja Johanna Mägi, who was chosen as one of Berlinale’s Shooting Stars and will be next seen in the Finnish remake of “Cold Feet.

“EastEnders” star Michelle Collins is making the leap from acting to production, and hopes to champion “working-class voices” in her projects.

During a panel at Content London on Thursday, Collins discussed the ins and outs of making the career transition alongside Sir Lenny Henry, Banijay U.K. CEO Patrick Holland, Marta Dusseldorp, Alexandra Rapaport, Gabija Siurbyte, Calle Jansson and Ernestas Jankauskas. Collins is currently back on BBC soap “EastEnders” as Cindy Beale, who was resurrected from the dead after 25 years, but said she recently went through a tough time in her career.

“I went to ‘EastEnders’ when I was 26, I stayed for 10 years and then I left and I was very successful. Had a very good agent, had lots of leading roles on primetime TV,” Collins said. “And then suddenly, as women who are actresses know, it kind of stopped. It’s weird. You don’t know when it does,...

“Being from a small country is not an obstacle but a plus because you have a story no one has heard of,” Lithuanian actor and showrunner Gabija Siurbyte (“Troll Farm”) told the TV Beats panel during this week’s Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event, hosted by the Black Nights Film Festival. It was the kind of optimism and can-do spirit that characterized the industry forum, which comprised an impressive range of industry panels, workshops and pitching sessions, as well as including a few innovations of its own.

Having shifted the schedule of the festival a week earlier – thereby avoiding Thanksgiving weekend – it has managed to attract a number of important industry figures, including producer Gale Anne Hurd, who gave two talks and offered inspiration from her career as well as answering questions about the role of AI and the end of the recent strikes, siding firmly with the unions and berating...

When the European Film Market kicks off in Berlin on Feb. 16, the three Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will share the stage as the EFM’s joint Countries in Focus. The showcase, which is supported by the Estonian Film Institute, the National Film Center of Latvia and the Lithuanian Film Center, will offer a range of events within the framework of the EFM, along with a selection of market premieres and screenings of Baltic films already making waves on the festival circuit. Twelve up-and-coming Baltic producers will also be presented to the international industry during a happy hour on Feb. 17 in the Gropius Bas.

Here’s a selection of Baltic buzz titles that the region’s top producers will be taking to Berlin:

Last Sentinel

Director: Tanel Toom

Producers: Ben Pullen, Ivo Felt, Jörg Bundschuh, Pippa Cross, Matthew James Wilkinson

Kate Bosworth stars in this sci-fi thriller from...

When a rock festival held in Tallinn in the summer of 1988 was shut down by Soviet authorities, thousands of Estonians took to the streets, waving Estonian flags and singing patriotic songs in a bold show of defiance of Soviet rule. By the festival’s final night, some 200,000 people had joined what would later be dubbed the Singing Revolution, a catalyst for the non-violent movement that swept across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the early-‘90s and paved the way for independence.

Even under Moscow’s thumb the Baltics demanded to be heard. For decades the three small nations have drawn on their historical, cultural and economic ties to create a sum that’s bigger than its parts, a collaborative spirit that’s also energized the countries’ growing screen industries, which will share the stage as joint Countries in Focus at this year’s European Film Market.

The showcase, which is...

Also world premiering is HBO Max series ‘Spy/Master’ and Indian drama ‘Roar’

Italian crime drama The Good Mothers is among the seven titles selected for Berlinale (February 16-26) Series strand.

Scroll down for full list of titles

The Disney+ series is directed by the UK’s Julian Jarrold, whose credits include Kinky Boots, Becoming Jane and Brideshead Revisted, and Italian filmmaker Elisa Amoruso. The Good Mothers is a UK-Italy co-production and follows three women trying to bring down the Italian mafia.

The first two episodes of the six-part series is one of five series world premiering at Berlinale.

These...

Since hosting its first dedicated drama series conference during the 2017 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, the Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event – the festival’s industry arm – has continued to expand the scope of its popular TV Beats Forum.

This year’s event, which will take place during the Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event from Nov. 18-25, includes a conference program focused on the latest industry trends, preview screenings of the newest series from the Nordic, Baltic and Central and Eastern European regions, and a co-financing market showcasing a curated selection of eight-10 series currently in development.

Marge Liiske, managing director of Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event, says the growing TV strand is a recognition of the “well-established reality” facing Baltic producers today.

“It’s been clear for many years that the most important thing is to follow audience demand and be also to tell just great stories,” she says. “Whether they’re on...

When U.K.-based Camelot Films’ “Prizefighter: The Life of Jem Belcher” was forced to relocate to Lithuania earlier this year, after the film’s Welsh financing fell through, executive producer Kestutis Drazdauskas knew the first challenge facing director Daniel Graham’s period drama would be re-creating 19th century England in 21st century Vilnius.

“It was an extensive set construction for us, because locations for us are minimal that could play as that period in England and Wales,” says Drazdauskas, who runs the production company Artbox and is chairman of the board of the Independent Producers Assn. of Lithuania. Time was of the essence for the 36-day shoot, but local crews were quick to respond, with set dressing and skillfully deployed props allowing the production to recreate the look and feel of Victorian England.

It’s a credit to what Drazdauskas describes as a “small but very efficient film industry” in Lithuania,...

When “Stranger Things” recently returned to Lithuania, where parts of season four of the Netflix supernatural drama were filmed in early 2020, the Baltic winter delivered on its usual promises of frigid temperatures and frosty weather. But it also offered a hopeful sign that 2021 might bring some relief, after the trials of a year turned topsy-turvy by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Last year we had no snow, so we had to make it all,” says Gary Tuck, of Baltic Film Services, which serviced the shoot. “This year we had lots of snow. So that was nice.”

It has been difficult to find a silver lining to a pandemic which has upended production across the globe, and which forced a shutdown in Lithuania for several months last spring. Yet 2020 was nevertheless the most successful year for the local film industry since the introduction of a tax incentive in 2014.

According to the Lithuanian Film Center,...

Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the leading cinema event in Central and Eastern Europe, has unveiled the projects that will be showcased during the online edition of its industry program, Eastern Promises.

Eastern Promises will feature a total of 41 film projects, which will be presented as part of its various sections – Works in Progress, First Cut+ Works in Progress, Docs in Progress, Works in Development – Feature Launch, and Eurimages Lab Project Award. The presentations of projects to industry professionals will take place July 6-8, and the most promising projects will receive awards of the total value of Euros 165,000.

In order to attend the online program, film industry professionals must be registered (click here) by June 22 at the latest.

Works in Progress

The Works in Progress sessions will be presented online on July 6 at 14:00-17:00 Cet and July 7 at 14:00-17:00 Cet.

The Trt prize of 10,000 Eur will be...

10 of the selected projects are live-action films, with one animation and one documentary.

Cinekid Script Lab, the European initiative for the development of children’s films, has picked 12 feature projects for its sixth edition, featuring more than 50% women across the selected teams.

The six-month script workshop will begin during the Cinekid for Professionals event in Amsterdam (Oct 21-25) and runs through to the Berlinale in February 2020.

A total of 10 of the 17 writers on the list are women, while nine of the 19 producers are female. There are no directors attached at this stage.

Alongside new talents, Cinekid welcomes back a few regulars,...