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Exclusive: Athens-based audiovisual group Tanweer is expanding its business into world sales of local language content, kicking off with an augural slate at the EFM.

The new operation will be headed by Tanweer Senior Vice President Aruzia Khan and executive Eliana Eliopoulos, who will both be on the ground in Berlin.

Until now, Tanweer has been primarily focused on production at home and buying rights for its home territory of Greece as well as satellite arms in Turkey, India and the Middle East.

The inaugural sales slate includes the epic 32-episode historical drama series Red River, recounting the Ottoman persecution of the Greek community living in the region of Pontus in northeastern Anatolia in the early 20th Century.

Directed by veteran Greek director Manousos Manousakis, the show is adapted from Charis Tsirkinidis’s novel of the same name. The 4M production is billed as the most expensive in the history of Greek television.

Grigoris Karantinakis’s bustling ensemble drama recreates the buildup to a 1922 massacre in what is now İzmir, even if some characters are just walking Wikipedia entries

This epic historical drama could have been called Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor or Once Upon a Time in Turkey, depending on which side of the Greek-Turkish divide you sit. That thorny geopolitical entanglement is what it attempts to unpick, sometimes too forcefully, in telling the story of the one-time melting pot of Smyrna (now İzmir). It culminates in a shockingly raw depiction of the 1922 massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Greek and Armenian population by Kemal Atatürk’s irregulars after they entered the city.

Filio Baltatzis (Mimi Denissi) is the matriarch of a Greek olive oil family in Smyrna, relaxed in their affluence in the Levantine port even as first world war storm clouds encroach. Greece is neutral but her husband...

Distributor Fathom Events will showcase critically acclaimed Greek war drama “Smyrna” on 700 screens in the U.S. as a one-night-only event on December 8. The limited wide release will raise the profile of the highest-budgeted production in the history of Greek cinema.

The film depicts the 1922 catastrophe at the end of the Greco-Turkish war that destroyed much of the city of Smyrna on Turkey’s Aegean coast, resulting in a monumental refugee crisis. The disaster and the events leading up to it are filtered through the eyes and experiences of a family living in Smyrna.

In anticipation of the one-time wide release, a special screening of the film will take place on November 29th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City under the auspices of the Greek Permanent Mission to the U.S. It will also be screened at the European Parliament in Brussels on January 11, 2023, as well...

BBC Studios Partners With ‘Repair Shop’ Star Jay Blades & Hungry Bear

BBC Studios has struck a first-look development deal with Hungry Jay Media, the Jv between Repair Shop breakout Jay Blades and Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel producer Hungry Bear. The one-year deal will give BBC Studios priority access to Hungry Jay’s slate, focusing on factual entertainment formats for the UK market that can travel. Hungry Jay launched in 2020 and has since been behind BBC One doc Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51 and Paramount-owned Channel 5’s Jay Blades: There’s No Place Like Home. Blades broke out helming BBC One’s hugely-popular The Repair Shop, which started life as a small daytime format before graduating to primetime and amassing millions of viewers each week. Hungry Bear, meanwhile, has produced some of the UK’s biggest entertainment hits of the past years including Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel...