SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain — “Día Cero,” “Malaka” and “Streisand Effect” won Tuesday night development prizes at Conecta Fiction, the co-production and networking forum, whose second edition runs June 18-21 in Galicia’s Santiago de Compostela, at the end of the St. James Way.
The awards were adjudicated by Telefonica’s paybox Movistar + and public broadcaster RTVE, two of the main Conecta Fiction partners, who valued the projects’ in part according to their potential fit with their respective TV fiction programming strategies.
A total 10 international co-production projects competed for the Movistar+ and RTVE awards, plus a further six that developed at the series lab of Spain’s General Society of Spanish Authors’ Foundation (SGAE). All projects were pitched Tuesday June 19 at Conecta Fiction.
The Movistar + award went to “Día Cero,” a high concept comedy project set up at Alejandro Miranda’s Spanish distribution-production house Versus Entertainment, marking the company’s entry into TV fiction production.
Co-penned by David Sainz, star-scribe of popular online series “Malviviendo,” and actor-writer Enrique Lojo (“Serramoura”), the series is set after an Apocalypse faails to happen. portraying how the non-end of the world impacts a group of people.
Miranda, an executive producer on films such as Rodrigo Cortés’ Sundance hit “Buried,” co-produces with Teresa Segura at Seville-based Diffferent Entertainment and Sin Sentido’s Rafael Portela.
With its development prize at Movistar + the project may follow a path previous walked by original black comedy series that successfully launched at the paybox, such as the Enrique López-Lavigne-produced “Spanish Shame.”
Detective drama project “Malaka,” created by seasoned Danish-Spanish screenwriter Daniel Corpas, won a development contract award given by RTVE.
The project unspools on Spain’s Costa del Sol, where the body of a young woman, the daughter of an important businessman, is found in its coastal waters.
“Malaka” has been developed at Fundación SGAE under the direction of Spanish showrunner Javier Olivares (“Isabel,” “The Department of Time”).
The new Digiseries Award, consisting of a development contract granted by RTVE’s digital platform Playz, went to “Streisand Effect,” directed by Paco Caballero (“Welcome to the Family”).
Written by Pep Jové Company, the half-hour comedy follows a young man who becomes an Internet celebrity much against his will. He attempts to recover his anonymity, helped by a vlogger and a hacker.
The project, previously presented at December’s Filmarket Hub TV Pitchbox in Madrid, is produced by Aritz Cirbian’s Compacto, a crowdfunding specialist.
Conecta Fiction’s first Branded Content contest, created in collaboration with beer company Estrella Galicia, was won by project “From Galicia with Love.”
The Conecta Fiction 2 Awards gala concluded with the world premiere of the first episode of Telemundo International Studios’ drama thriller “El Recluso” (The Inmate”), the company’s first move into premium drama production.
The 2nd Conecta Fiction is supported by Galicia’s Xunta government via the Galician Agency of Cultural Industries (AGADIC), as well as the ICEX Spain Trade and Investment export board and Fundación SGAE. The event is produced by Inside Content.
