Jaume
Roures

Unveiled at February’s Berlin Festival, the alliance between Spain’s Mediapro and Argentina’s Burman Office, which saw Mediapro take a substantial stake in Daniel Burman’s Buenos Aires-based TV production hub, is symptomatic of the large TV drama ambitions of Spain’s Mediapro Group and its co-founder Jaume Roures.

With a 7% stake in Atresmedia Group and production offices in 35 cities in 25 countries, Mediapro is already a major power in film and TV in Southern Europe. It now aims to forge one of the biggest independent creation-production TV hubs based out of Spanish-speaking markets aimed at making content for the whole world. One first step was co-production of “The Young Pope” with Sky, HBO and Canal Plus; a second was hiring Keshet’s Ran Tellem, an Emmy Award-winning producer on “Homeland.” Now it has tied the knot with Burman, a leading light of the New Argentine Cinema (“Lost Embrace”) whose Burman Office created “Supermax,” which is set to produce “Edha,” Netflix’s first TV series in Argentina. More talent-driven creative alliances are likely to follow.

Roures’ global TV drive is hardly unexpected. As a film producer, though born in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, a region consumed by its ambitions for independence, Roures has never been content to make just local fare, partnering with the beIN Media Group on rights-brokering ventures around the world and producing films by Woody Allen (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”), Oliver Stone (“Comandante”), Roman Polanski (“Carnage”). He will now bring Mediapro’s financial and distribution muscle and creative power to the international market’s fast-emerging new independent TV production scene. He is a significant new entrant.