A program like no other.
Its organizers will have had to deal with numerous obstacles which have made available fiction rarer.
The Lille Séries Mania festival revealed on Wednesday the festivities that await series fans who will travel to Hauts-de-France from March 15 to 22.
On the program 52 series, 26 previews.
The selection committee viewed a total of 369 titles.
21 countries are represented, including three newcomers: New Zealand, Latvia and South Africa.
To discover
TV program this evening: our selection of the day
“This year is marked by various international crises whose impact is obvious. The wars on the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian fronts have drastically reduced the proposals emanating from these territories. In Israel, most filming has been stopped. For the first time, Séries Mania does not present any Israeli series. South America is still subject to geopolitical and economic turbulence
,” warned Laurence Herszberg, general director of Séries Mania, as a preamble.
Without forgetting the shock wave of the writers' and actors' strike in the United States which paralyzed the industry for many months.
Fewer American series could be programmed.
But Séries Mania has achieved a big success by obtaining for its opening the highly anticipated
The Three-Body Problem
, the new great fresco from the creators of
Game Of Thrones
which will arrive on Netflix on March 21.
Viewers will recognize some familiar faces from Westeros in the cast: Liam Cunningham, John Bradley and Jonathan Pryce.
Read also For its 2024 edition, Séries Mania offers advice from the Emily in Paris gang
It took David Benioff and DB Weiss five years to find the key to this adaptation of the cult SF trilogy by Chinese novelist Liu Cixin.
In the midst of the cultural revolution in communist China in the 1960s, the decisions of a young astrophysicist undergoing “re-education” will have unimaginable consequences four decades later.
Its signal is picked up by an intelligent extraterrestrial species, whose planet is dying.
But what will happen when they realize that the human species has within it the potential for mass destruction?
Despite its disaster film appearance,
The Three-Body Problem
promises to be as in-depth on the laws of quantum physics as
Oppenheimer
.
Edouard Philippe in the shadows
Refereed by a jury chaired by the author of the unfinished Netflix saga
The OA
Zal Batmanglij, the international competition sees Arte place
Rematch,
which replays the duel between world chess champion Garry Kasparov and the computer Deep Blue.
France Télévisions is banking on its political thriller
In the Shadow
,
based on the novel by former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe and his accomplice Gilles Boyer.
In the credits: Melvil Poupaud, Karin Viard and Swann Arlaud.
A regular on Series Mania, showrunner Chris Brancato (
Narcos
) continues his exploration of drug trafficking with
Hotel Cocaine
, which recreates Miami at the end of the Seventies.
From Australia comes the family sagas
Apples Never Fall
, starring Annette Bening and Sam Neill about a too-perfect family, whose happiness is called into question by the disappearance of its matriarch.
House Of Gods
examines an influential family of Iraqi origin, whose position on the island continent is called into question by the appointment of the paterfamilias at the head of a mosque.
Herrhausen – The Banker and The Bomb
traces the never-solved murder of the boss of Deutsche Bank which traumatized Germany.
So long, Marianne
tells the story of the passion between the musician Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Jensen.
And finally a bit of comedy with the British
Boarders
about five black high school students admitted to a posh boarding school.
From this selection, Laurence Herszberg distinguishes several basic trends: the need to find an escape from reality and social life in the face of an overly merciless world, the nerve center that is the family, the pursuit of desire and sexuality, the quest for mysticism, artificial intelligence and its threats.
Buckingham and Anne of Austria
Themes also at work in the French competition.
The world does not exist
by Arte, with Niels Schneider, features a journalist returning to the town of his childhood.
Also developed by the Franco-German channel,
Machine
by Thomas Bidegain, with Margot Bancilhon and JoeyStarr: a former special forces veteran, experienced in martial arts and the handling of weapons, who despite herself becomes the heroine of the unionists at the factory where she took refuge and created a new identity.
A dangerous friendship
from France 2 retraces the young years of marriage, marked by intrigues and disenchantment, between Louis XIII and Anne of Austria.
Homejacking
by OCS sees a middle-class couple confronted with a burglary, the motive of which has less to do with the goods to be stolen than with a past trouble.
M6's Murder Club
teams up Tiphaine Daviot and Éric Cantona in the hunt for a serial killer devastating Hauts-de-France.
Developed by the rapper Booba,
Ourika
from Prime Video takes us back to the urban riots of 2005.
Outside of competition, festival-goers will be able to count on the traditional premiere of the new
HPI
season , with Queen Audrey Fleurot.
Mary and George
will see Julianne Moore transform into a Machiavellian ambitious mother who will do everything to put her son, Duke of Buckingham, into the bed of King James I of England (the same one to whom Alexandre Dumas attributes tender feelings towards Anne of Austria in
Les three musketeers
!).
Mania series are also masterclasses and meetings.
The creator and director of Sambre,
Jean-Xavier de Lestrade , will participate
on the theme of fiction versus documentary.
Actress Shirine Boutella, journalist Marianne Levy and screenwriter Clémence Madeleine Perdrillat (
Irrésistible
) will discuss the soft-power of romantic comedies.
Kelly Rutherford (
Gossip Girl
and
Escort Boys
), Laurent Lafitte (
Tapie)
and the novelist Douglas Kennedy, president of the international panorama jury, will look back on their respective careers.
The distinguished guests, confirmed for the moment, who will walk the red carpet, are mainly French and from the competing series.
This list will undoubtedly evolve.
Last year, Brian Cox (
Succession
) and Marcia Cross (
Desperate Housewives
) indeed attracted crowds.