TIFF standout film “Blindspot Berlin,” starring Albrecht Schuch, who starred in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” took home the Best Edited Series, Screenplay and Audience Award at the 4th edition of Cadiz’s Southern International TV Series Festival on Wednesday night.
This triple effect was announced at the SISF awards gala, where other awards were given to many of this year’s hand-picked coolest films: Danish docuseries “The Oligarch and the Art Dealer,” Isabel Coixet’s “Someone Should Ban Sunday Afternoons,” Chile’s “Patagonia,” created by Patricio Pereira and María Elena Wood, Norway’s “Still Breathing,” and Mediaset España’s nonfiction documentary “The Dirty Years: Where is Nani?”
“Blindspot Berlin,” a true crime thriller sold by Beta Film and supported by Germany’s ARD, Europe’s largest public broadcaster, as well as rbb, NDR and HR, follows German police efforts to prevent the Christmas market terrorist attack in Berlin on Dec. 19, 2016, that killed 13 people and injured dozens more. But their efforts are being undermined by the German institutions that aim to support them.
“Blindspot Berlin,” from co-creator, co-writer and director David Nawrath (“Your Honor,” “Atlas”), was praised by the SISF jury for its “exceptional narrative power, suspense and dramatic suspense experience that grips viewers until the end, even if they know how the events turn out.”
The jury observes that some of this tension stems from the rationalization of information. It also stems from the constant creation of knots of tension in the narrative, as in Episode 1, when Detective Lt. Frank Laudlin (Schuch) and rookie Iraqi police officer Isra Al-Husseini (Miss Layla, “Elaha”) race not to stop a terrorist attack but to recruit recruits for the Islamic State from German soil.
SISF’s three awards contribute to selection for the prestigious Primetime section of the Toronto Film Festival; where “Blindspot Berlin” became one of only two European series, and on the first day of SISF it was announced that a film would be shot for Spain.
Other Grand Prizes
“The Oligarch and the Art Dealer,” an Arte series co-created, written and directed by Andreas Dalsgaard, was a highlight of Sundance, CPH-DOX and Canneseries, winning Best Non-Fiction Series.
Isabel Coixet received the City of Cadiz Award for “Someone Should Ban Sunday Afternoons,” an Arte series produced by France’s “The Bureau” showrunner Eric Rochant’s Maui Entertainment. Tim Robbins guest-stars in a drama-comedy miniseries in which three twentysomething film buff roommates in Paris spend their Sunday afternoons watching the saddest movies they can find while dealing with existential angst. The Cadiz jury said the award awarded the series “an excellent visual gift and sophistication for being a portrait of a contemporary generation that needs to be heard.”
In terms of new series, Special Mention in Fiction Series goes to SISF’s anticipated world premiere, “Patagonia,” an echo thriller/family drama set in the dazzling thousand-year-old larch tree forests of Southern Chile that also features an empathetic central performance from Itziar Ituño (“Money Heist,” “Intimacy”).
The Best Editing Actor award went to the agenda-driven Norwegian medical drama “Still Breathing,” billed as Norway’s answer to “The Pitt.” and its debut this April gave Norwegian public broadcaster NRK its biggest ever drama opening outside of the broadcaster’s Christmas shows.
The SISF jury praised the series’ “extraordinary capacity to build a portrait of a diverse and complex society through a choral cast. The naturalness, coherence and solidity of both lead and secondary performances structure a believable human universe full of nuance.”
The creator of the series is “Occupied” writer Karianne Lund and the director is Erik Svensson from “Safe House”. “Still Breathing” is produced by “Beforeigners” Rubicon TV, a Banijay company.
Among Spanish dramas, beyond “Patagonia,” a pioneering Spain-Chile co-production, the biggest winner is another blockbuster, “The Dirty Years: Where is Nani?” It has been proven to be. From Mediaset España, which uses talking heads and archive footage to reconstruct the case of El Nani, a young small-time criminal who disappeared from police custody in 1983. The subsequent trial, involving Francoist bigoted police criminals, became a show trial for Spain’s young democracy.
Southern Boost Rewards
South Boost, a six-project competition for Andalusian TV producers, was won by Odeón Studios’ “Los extranjeros,” a film blending murder mystery and science fiction, set in an Andalusian mining town in the late 1980s, created by Julio Blez and Hugo Baena.
Special Mention went to Enciende TV’s six-episode “Folklóricas,” which reunited four faded copla stars for a TV documentary in 1991, created by Fany de la Chica and Miguel Ángel Parra, reigniting old rivalries.