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Passion and Perseverance, the two watchwords at this year’s TV Drama Vision in Göteborg will resonate across this year’s program where a record 700 delegates will take the pulse of what’s hot and upcoming from the Nordics and Europe.

Unfolding parallel to the Göteborg Film Festival, the Nordics’ biggest TV drama showcase and networking event will run Jan 30-31.

“This is what we need!” said TV Drama Vision honcho Cia Edström about the passion infused in the 60-plus series to be showcased – and about perseverance in the industry, to be debated by the 100 guest speakers – including U.S. streaming giants Netflix, Disney+– first time on-stage – Amazon and all key Nordic commissioners.

“Times are tough-not only in the Nordics but internationally. Our industry is going through profound changes,” she said, citing the microeconomic headwinds impacting drama investors’ coin, artificial intelligence, the halt in production-triggered among others by Hollywood strikes,...

The Italy-Slovak feature took the Screen International best pitch prize.

Sahraa Karimi’s Taliban drama Flight From Kabul has won the Screen International best pitch award from Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event, the industry platform of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (Poff).

The project is inspired by Karimi’s own experience of the 2021 Taliban offensive that retook control of Afghanistan, and forced the filmmaker to flee her homeland. The Italy-Slovakia co-production tells the story of Zibaa, a successful Afghan filmmaker and anti-Taliban activist who has got engaged; only for her wedding plans to be destroyed when the Taliban seizes Kabul.

The...

The Italy-Slovak feature took the Screen International best pitch prize.

Sahraa Karimi’s Taliban drama Flight From Kabul has won the Screen International best pitch award from Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event, the industry platform of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (Poff).

The project is inspired by Karimi’s own experience of the 2021 Taliban offensive that retook control Afghanistan, and forced the filmmaker to flee her homeland. The Italian-Slovak co-production tells the story of Zibaa, a successful Afghan filmmaker and anti-Taliban activist who has got engaged; only for her wedding plans to be destroyed when the Taliban seizes Kabul. The film...

The Italy-Slovak feature took the Screen International best pitch prize.

Sahraa Karimi’s Taliban drama Flight From Kabul has won the Screen International best pitch award from Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event, the industry platform of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (Poff).

The project is inspired by Karimi’s own experience of the 2021 Taliban offensive that retook control Afghanistan, and forced the filmmaker to flee her homeland. The Italian-Slovak co-production tells the story of Zibaa, a successful Afghan filmmaker and anti-Taliban activist who has got engaged; only for her wedding plans to be destroyed when the Taliban seizes Kabul. The film...

‘Behind The Iron Curtain’ took the most promising project prize.

Estonian drama series Behind The Iron Curtain won the €3,000 most promising project prize at the TV Beats Forum, part of the Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event platform.

Currently in development, the English-language series will consist of six 45-minute episodes, following three young women from different backgrounds in the chaotic world of the Soviet music industry.

Written by Leana Jalukse, it is produced by Helen Lohmus and Rene Ezra for Estonia’s Oree Films, in co-production with Denmark’s Stikling Film. Jalukse’s debut feature as writer Mother won best Estonian film...

Asia Argento (“The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things”), Frances Barber (“A Bird Flew In”), Tamer Hassan (“The Football Factory”), Laura Whitmore (“Sadhbh”) and child actor Erin Ainsworth have joined the cast of “A Mother for an Hour.”

The film, which is being directed by Giga Agladze, follows the story of a woman who poses as the lost mother of a dying child and discovers through this act a world of deceit and violence.

Agladze’s most recent movie is surrealistic drama “The Other Me” (2022), starring Jim Sturgess and Andrea Pejic, executive produced by David Lynch.

“A Mother for an Hour” is being produced by Kirsty Bell, Goldfinch CEO and co-founder of The Number 44, and Ben Charles Edwards, also a co-founder of The Number 44. The executive producers are Phil McKenzie and David Kereselidze. It is shooting in the North of England, predominantly in Newcastle, Hartlepool and surrounding areas.

Production...

Estonian producers and companies are looking to reproduce the success of the breakout drama “Traitor” with two new series set for release in 2024.

Financed by Estonian streaming company Elisa and featuring local talent both in front of and behind the camera, “Traitor” was the first domestically produced TV show to have international legs.

“Traitor” tells the story of the biggest spy scandal in Estonian history, when an Estonian defense official was recruited by the Russians in 2004 as the country was set to become the latest member of NATO. Running over two seasons from 2019, the show has been a hit domestically and was distributed internationally by GoQuest Media and will reach U.S. viewers via the Spanish-language streaming platform FlixLatino.

“The best compliment I received at Mipcom in Cannes this year was from an international producer who said they still feel sad they didn’t get ‘Traitor’ back then,” Toomas Ili,...

When it was first released in 2005, I can’t imagine that designers Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews would ever have expected that their debut game, Twilight Struggle, would hold first place on Board Game Geek for more than five years. There have now been several revisions, printings and special editions of the game, leading to the version I have sat in front of me – the 2016 Deluxe Edition.

The game itself is a clean, focussed experience that is shared between two players acting as the Ussr and the USA respectively and it takes place between 1945 and 1989. For those who didn’t already know what the theme is, you’ve probably guessed by now; Twilight Struggle is a faithful recreation of The Cold War.

The game takes place over a deceptively brief sounding ten turns, although each of them is split into either seven or eight rounds of card play. Each of...

Most films about The German Democratic Republic, commonly known as East Germany, tend to be in the spy thriller variety. This makes sense, since bureaucratic backstabbing and political paranoia were more readily available than food and water behind The Iron Curtain during its heyday. Masterful genre-bending works like 1965’s immensely influential John le Carré adaptation “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” and 2006’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner “The Lives of Others” took full advantage of a bleak society where even the most close-knit families couldn’t fully trust one another in order to create truly immersive and unpredictable mysteries. Based on Uwe Tellkamp’s novel “The Tower: Tales from a Vanished Land”, a positively reviewed best seller in Germany, “The Tower” is a two-part mini-series that attempts to bring an original angle to a story about The Gdp. By electing to present a drama instead...

The classic Tetris turns 30. Ryan shares a few remarkable things about the legendary videogame...

Top 10

Somewhere in Moscow in 1984, 29-year-old computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov sat at his work station, deep within a building called the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Here, in front of his hulking computer, an Elektronika 60, Pajitnov was working on one of his latest programs. If you’d been one of his superiors, Pajitnov would have told you that he was examining its code for bugs. But in reality, he was addicted.

Had you taken a look over Pajitnov’s shoulder at what he was working on back then, it’s likely you wouldn’t have thought much of it in any case. Just a few characters juddering down a screen - the Elektronika being such a crude computer that it could only display text. But what the young programmer had in front of him was the early...

Hollywood and Broadway star whose family life inspired the musical Gypsy

Those who know the gorgeously gaudy Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical Gypsy (1959) will remember the refrain of "my name is June, what's yours?" addressed to the audience by the curly-haired child performer. "Baby" June was based on June Havoc, who has died aged 97, and the show was inspired by her early days in Us vaudeville with her "monstrous" stage mother and older sister Rose Louise, who became Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous stripper.

"I think Gypsy was one of the most smashing shows I've seen in my life," Havoc once told me. "But very little to do with fact. My mother was not such a monster. Few parents who had a child who, at the age of two, stood on her toes and danced every time she heard music, could resist putting her forward. Particularly if the child was happy doing it.