Series Mania Forum, one of Europe’s largest and most prestigious TV series festivals, is being held in Lille from March 15-22. This 2024, the «Coming Next from Spain» panel, presents five upcoming Spanish TV fiction projects, involving major local production companies and distributors.
Following the success of Spanish television series, Spain has become one of the most consistent providers of global platforms. Today, the successful trend continues with the 3 seasons of Mediaset España and Alea Media‘s Wrong Side of the Tracks series. During the period of March 2024, these non-English TV fictions are the most watched on Netflix, with 41.6 million hours watched.
Organized by ICEX Spain Trade and Investment, and the brand Audiovisual form Spain, the event «Coming Next from Spain», offers the opportunity to discover some of the most attractive upcoming Spanish dramas. The fictions being presented during the event are:
- Santuario on Atresmedia TV:
The new bet on TV fiction from production company Atresmedia TV, in collaboration with Pokeepsie Films, is directed by Rodrigo Ruiz Gallardón and Zoe Berriatua. Montse García, Álex de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang as executive producers and Lucía-Alonso-Allende as co-executive producer. Santuario is a sci-fi thriller, which explores motherhood as seen from the point of view of a dystopian future. The series adapts the acclaimed podcast of the same name created by Bartual and Pacheco. Aura Garrido plays Valle, an engineer specialized in AI with very clear values. When she is offered a job at the Sanctuary, she will have to rethink her ideals. Lucía Guerrero is Pilar, a woman who arrives at the Sanctuary three months pregnant and to whom everything will soon start to seem strange. With Santuario, Atresmedia (through its premium content platform Atresplayer) continues its very ambitious commitment to the production of television fiction, premiering more than a dozen new Spanish television fiction series by 2023.
- Bellas Artes on Movistar Plus+:
Movistar Plus+ ‘s new original series , created by Argentineans Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, will premiere simultaneously in Spain and Latin America in 2024. Through Telefónica and Star+‘s platform, viewers will be able to enjoy this year the six 30-minute episodes into which the fiction is divided. Bellas Artes features Argentinean star Óscar Martínez as a prestigious, intellectual and sophisticated art historian and cultural manager, although also quite cynical and conceited. Appointed director of an important modern art museum in Madrid, the protagonist will have to deal with a variety of different circumstances and conflicts. The cast is completed by Ángela Molina, Ana Wagener, Dani Rovira and Jorge López. The new fiction is directed by Martín Bustos and produced by Pablo E. Bossi, Cabe Bossi, Pol Bossi and Maxi Lasansky.
- Citas en Barcelona (S2) by Filmax:
The Filmax group presents the second season of Citas en Barcelona at Series Mania. It is a romantic comedy, an adaptation of the successful «Cites» format, currently shooting in the Catalan capital. Directed by prolific creator and Filmax executive Pau Freixas, Citas Barcelona follows the example of the first season of the series, where the characters meet face to face after contacting each other online, looking for love, sex or simply someone to take them away from loneliness. The cast incorporates popular Spanish actors such as Leonor Watling, Asier Etxeandía, Bruna Cusí, Verónica Echegui, Anna Castillo, Ricardo Gómez, Yolanda Ramos and Óscar Casas. Like the first season, the second season will premiere at the end of 2024, exclusively on Prime Video and the Catalan streaming service 3Cat.
- La Otra Vida by The Good Mood-Mediawan:
La Otra Vida is an eight-episode, 52-minute series produced by The Good Mood (part of the international Mediawan group), and picked up by Disney+. The series chronicles how a few days after moving into a new house with her family, Gabriela discovers a vein of an unknown mineral under her pantry floor. When she touches it, a strange and disturbing phenomenon occurs: Gabriela sees fragments of the future and, in one of them, the death of her daughter Emma. After realizing that these episodes are not the result of a physical or mental imbalance, Gaby will begin to fight to change her daughter’s future with the help of Andrés, a police inspector who has gone through a similar experience to hers. Javier Lorenzo and Randall Broman are responsible for international distribution at Mediawan Rights.
- Heartless from Onza Distribution:
Heartless chronicles a series of mysterious disappearances that shock Madrid’s high society: an unknown criminal is on the loose, slaughtering wealthy men in a twisted game played to death. Judge Lucia Vergara oversees the case, and only Haro, a character first seen in the thriller series Parot, a man Lucia imprisoned 10 years ago, understands the minds of dangerous criminals like him. Lucia will reluctantly join Haro to stop the killer at all costs, but little does she know that the sophisticated but brutal aristocrat is actually planning a vendetta against the judge who punished him by law. The series is created by Alonso Laporta for Onza, Spain’s leading international independent distributor and content producer.
