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Series Mania 2018: full program

Screenings at 2nd TV Festival are free to the public if you are quick to reserve seats.

The full program of Television screenings at Series Mania in Melbourne next month has been announced.

It includes screenings of Dead Lucky, Fighting Season, Deep State, American Woman, Come Home and Patrick Melrose with attending guest screenwriter David Nicholls.

Hugo Weaving, Rachel Griffiths and Robert Connolly will also attend.

All screenings are free but tickets must be booked.

ACMI CEO and Director Katrina Sedgwick said: “Bringing together some of the finest local and international content, Series Mania Melbourne 2018 presents 16 Australian premieres and 5 world premieres. Highlights of the festival range from an opening night world premiere of Catriona McKenzie’s Indigenous web series Wrong Kind of Black to an in- conversation on BBC First’s Patrick Melrose with cast member Hugo Weaving and writer David Nicholls. Series Mania Melbourne has something to offer everyone from fans to TV industry professionals alike.”

Film Victoria CEO, Caroline Pitcher said: “In just a short few weeks Melbourne will become a metropolis for supreme and innovative television content. It is your one unmissable chance in 2018 to experience fresh and binge-worthy international and local TV series. Screen industry greats like writer David Nicholls will share with you their ‘secret sauce’ when it comes to facing and overcoming the challenging process of screen storytelling. You’re guaranteed to walk away inspired and enlightened by the global television landscape and the creative opportunities it presents for Australians.”

ACMI, Fed Square, Melbourne
Thursday 19-Sunday 22 July, 2018 Tix at ACMI
Friday 20 July • Industry Day Tix at ACMI

Screenings:

• Autonomies (Israel), an alternate-reality drama set in a near-future Israel divided into 2 states – one secular, one Orthodox – wherein tensions are raised by the revelation that a midwife switched 2 babies at birth, 7 years ago;
• Fighting Season (Australia), a complex, character-driven drama about Australian soldiers returning from Afghanistan, starring Jay Ryan, Ewen Leslie and Kate Mulvaney and directed by Kate Woods. A Q&A will follow the screening.
• American Woman (USA), 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 2 kids after leaving her husband amid the rise of second-wave feminism in 70s L.A.;
• 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;
• Come Home (UK), a gut-wrenching, three-part BBC drama starring Christopher Eccleston as a soft- spoken mechanic struggling to come to terms with his wife’s unexpected departure, leaving him and their three children after 19 years of marriage;
• 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;
• The Day (Belgium), a 12-part ensemble series that intensely dissects a hostage situation in a bank, moving deftly between the perspectives of those placed on the inside and out – hostage-takers, victims, police and press – over the course of one day;
• Dead Lucky (Australia), SBS’s new four-part crime drama headlined by Rachel Griffiths, and premiering Wednesday July 25, is a gripping thriller which twists and turns at a frenetic pace through the streets of Sydney. Two detectives with a complicated history, a share-house of international students, a pair of greedy convenience store owners, and a violent fugitive collide, setting off a chain of events with devastating consequences. RACHEL GRIFFITHS will be in attendance and will do a live Q&A following the screening;
• Deep State (UK), Episodes 1 & 2, from co-creator, writer, director and showrunner Matthew Parkhill (Rogue), this is a visceral, intense and highly addictive espionage thriller starring Mark Strong (Kingsman, The Golden Circle) and Joe Dempsie (Game of Thrones), as an ex spy whose past comes back to haunt him as he returns to the filed to avenge the death of his son; Eps 1 and 2 are directed by Australian director ROBERT CONNOLLY (The Slap, Balibo, Three Dollars) who will do a Q&A following the screening;
• 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;
• Insoupçonnable (France), a 10-episode thriller that follows Chloé Fisher, a brilliant Parisian criminologist sent to Lyon to investigate a murder, in this successful remake of the British series The Fall that offers a chilling face-off in the Gallic capital;
• Killing the Father (Spain), a 4-part episodic drama spanning two decades in Barcelona, which follows an obsessive, authoritarian father bewildered to find 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;
• Maman a Tort (Mother is Wrong, France), 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 school psychologist;
• Oddlands (Australia), a darkly humorous 30-minute sci-fi from Matchbox Pictures and Back to Back Theatre, 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. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with key cast and creatives;
• The Oil Fund (Norway), an ambitious and edgy fictional drama that takes an insider look at the colliding worlds of high finance and public service, presented by Wild Bunch TV and Zwart Arbeid;
• Patrick Melrose (UK), the latest from famed screenwriter and Series Mania special guest David Nicholls; adapting the novels of Edward St Aubyn, the series tracks the upper-class Brit Patrick Melrose (a riveting Benedict Cumberbatch) from a privileged but deeply traumatic childhood through to severe substance abuse in his twenties in New York and, ultimately, toward recovery back home.

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. A Q&A will follow the screening.

More info at ACMI.

One Response

  1. ‘Patrick Melrose’ is tailor made for Benedict Cumberbatch’s style of acting but I suspect it’s drug binge and spiritual recovery theme will put off some viewers no matter how well written and acted it may be.

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