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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.

Titles from “Lupin” co-creator François Uzan, former Netflix top exec Erik Barmack, indie multinational Boat Rocker and Brendan Foley, writer of “Cold Courage,” will be pitched on Wednesday and Thursday at Spain’s Conecta Fiction & Entertainment. The pitch sessions form the industry centerpiece of the meet. Following, profiles of entries in four of the six categories: Copro, High-End, Docudramas and Feel Good:

CoPro Pitch

“Destape,” (Satisfaction Iberia, Spain)

The latest from Pablo Barrera, a co-creator of admired crime drama “Punta Escarlata,” a mystery drama turning on (the fictional) Rosa Burnett, a face of Spain’s ‘70s destape cinema, movies with tantalizing nudity. Now, thought dead, Burnett returns from gthe shadows to wreak her vengeance.

“Fin del Año,” (Têm Dênde Productions, Brazil)

A supernatural suspense drama from Vânia Lima at Salvador’s Têm Demdê Productions, behind Ruy Guerra’s “Time, Knifed,” presented at Ventana Sur. A bus transporting five people who...

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...

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...

A girl’s mysterious disappearance sends her bereaved mother on a search for answers. But the unsettling truths she discovers will force her to rethink her ideas of God and faith, in a potentially haunting series that probes at eternal questions about life after death.

“The Cloud” is partly set on earth and partly in an imagined afterlife, where human consciousness is uploaded into a digital blizzard of zeros and ones. Created by Lithuania’s Domanté Urmonaité and Martynas Mendelis, the 8 x 50’ series was selected for the drama series pitching competition in Mia.

Built around the season-long story arc of the girl’s disappearance, “The Cloud” will use parallel story lines to explore existential dilemmas about faith, mortality and the afterlife. “How far can blind faith take you? How far can we go by trusting our lives to artificial minds?” the creators asked. “At its core, ‘The Cloud’ is a show about faith.