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Series Mania 2018 announces first titles

World Premieres amongst Melbourne's second free TV festival in July.

11 television series & 4 web series, including 2 World Premieres, are amongst first titles announced for Series Mania Melbourne 2018.

The 4 day event, a sister festival to France’s Series Mania, is again hosted by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Film Victoria from July 19 – 22.

Announced highlights include:

  • Pilot episode of American Woman, a drama series created by acclaimed show runner, producer and creator John Wells (ER, Third Watch, Shameless), starring Alicia Silverstone as an unconventional mother struggling to raise two kids after leaving her husband amid the rise of second-wave feminism in 1970s Los Angeles;
  • Deep State (pictured, FOX Network, airing on SBS), an eight-episode, grounded espionage thriller starring Mark Strong, whose first four episodes are directed by Australian director and Series Mania special guest Robert Connolly (The Slap, Balibo, Three Dollars);
  • Maman a Tort (Mother is wrong, France), a sophisticated adaptation of Michel Bussi’s popular book about a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who says his mother is not his real mummy, a claim that seems impossible but is then believed by the psychologist at his school.
  • Wrong Kind of Black (Australia), a four-part web series that moves between the crocs and cops of 1960s Queensland to Melbourne’s dance-floors at the height of the disco inferno, weaving a rich story about the experiences of Indigenous Australia, via the eyes of DJ Boori Monty Pryor.

Most public events are free but audiences are encouraged to book early to avoid disappointment.  Tickets to public events will be available from Monday 2 July 2018.

The festival includes a dedicated industry day, Stories Without Borders, with local and international key speakers and decision makers.

ACMI CEO and Director Katrina Sedgwick said: ““We are delighted to be partnering with Film Victoria to bring Series Mania back to Melbourne. Building on the success of the inaugural Series Mania Melbourne, ACMI will again host the latest in local and international series content. From BBC’s Deep State to the Australian web series Wrong Kind of Black; from industry panels to free public screenings, we give audiences a sneak peek at the latest trends and must-watch shows before they hit screens.”

Film Victoria CEO, Caroline Pitcher said: “Series Mania Melbourne taps into the knowledge of some of the best creators and executives in the TV biz, whilst highlighting the incredible capabilities of Victorian creatives and the depth of screen culture in our state. We look forward to working with ACMI to deliver another terrific festival.”

Further television series playing at Screen Media Melbourne:

Autonomies (Israel), an alternate-reality drama set in a near-future Israel divided into two states – one secular, one Orthodox – wherein tensions are raised by the revelation that a midwife switched two babies at birth, seven years ago;
An Ordinary Woman (Russia), a deliciously binge-able drama from Russia about a brothel-keeper named Marina (a knock-out Anna Mihalkova), who is trying desperately to conceive a third baby with her unfaithful husband in the hope of saving her family
Harem (Israel,Reshet 13 / Endemol Shine Israel), a fabulist series inspired by real-life cults about a mystic healer who lives in Tel Aviv with twenty wives, who birthed him over forty children;
Killing the Father (Spain), a four-part episodic drama spanning two decades in Barcelona, which follows an obsessive, authoritarian father bewildered to find that life is not turning out as he’d planned;
Liberty (Denmark), a humorous and brutal portrait of expat life and colonial impact, following two Scandinavian families stationed in Tanzania in the 1980s;
The Counted (Russia), a mysterious fantasy about two epidemiologists who are dispatched to a far-flung corner of Russia where a strange infection has killed several people, only to find the reality more unusual than anything they’d imagined;
Oddlands (Australia), a darkly humorous 30-minute sci-fi from Back to Back, a professional theatre company with an ensemble of actors with disabilities at its core, about two members of a clean-up crew in a strange toxic wasteland who stumble upon what may be the last human survivor.

Further web series playing at Screen Media Melbourne:

The Accidental Wolf (USA), a political web thriller about an unhappily married, New York housewife who receives a call one night that implicates her within a shady military cover-up;
Fresh! (Australia), a dramedy by Melbourne’s Nikki Tran set in a local fresh food market where staff grapple with family, fickle customers and a shiny new supermarket across the road.

More titles are yet to be announced.

acmi.net.au/events/series-mania-melbourne-tv-event

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