With an eye in the upcoming MipCancun and the Latam audiences, ORF Enterprises is present at Mipcom 2023 with very attractive titles like School of Champions and the upcoming Kafka
* with production from Mónica Iriarte, from Cannes, France
ORF-Enterprise traveled to Cannes for this year’s Mipcom with a slate of premium dramas and documentaries that look to build on the success the Austrian company has found in territories like France, Italy and Spain.
“ORF is having great success in many countries,” emphasizes Phoebe Clarke, Sales Representative for Latin America at ORF-Enterprises, said to ttvnews at Mipcom. “ORF sold two reality shows to USA, that now are going in production. Also sold a lot of their products to Pay TV and Free TV in Italy, Spain and France, and the results have been very very positive.”
First on the drama slate is Kafka, about Franz Kafka, the world’s most widely read German-language author, who would have died 100 years ago in June 2024. To mark the occasion, Superfilm, in co-production with ORF and ARD with participation of ORF-Enterprise, are producing the six-part mini-series, telling the story of the peculiar twentieth century writer.
“Kafka is still in production. He is an incredibly important person and so much is not known about him,” shared Clarke.
“One of the areas this series focuses on is in the person that actually ‘betrays’ Kafka, Max Brod, the man that didn’t destroy all of Kafka’s books and his work as the author has asked him to do just before his dead. Brod he published his works, and that is the reason why Kafka is known today,” she explained.
Also on the drama side, the distributor is presenting School of Champions, which tells the story of a freshman class at Austria’s most renowned and prestigious ski-academy. The graduates of this highly reputable institution regularly dominate the professional skiing world, but at this boarding school of pubescent athletes there is only a thin line between love and jealousy, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and frustration.
“It’s about young people learning who they are, developing their own skills, and in a very, very competitive atmosphere, because it’s in a school were they are learning how to be champions,” the executive explained. “The pictures are actually fantastic, but the thing I think is more important is that it’s a young people film, not about older people, it really is about teenagers and early-twenties, a coming of age story.”
With Mipcom just getting started, ORF is already thinking about the next big markets, with a slate of new titles ready to meet Latin American audiences at this year’s MipCancun.
“For MipCancun we are highlighting another universal program, ORF is well-known for its fantastic universal programs. This year we have a two parter, Secret India, focusing on the animals that everyone knows about the Rudyard Kipling stories.
Secret India – The Real Jungle Book follows the daily and seasonal struggles of India’s charismatic animals, including tigers, wolves, elephants, and black panthers, that author Rudyard Kipling depicted in his work, bringing to life the truth beyond the fiction.
“We are also showing classical music. One program is with top musicians from the Berlin Philharmonie and from the Vienna Philharmonie. They played crossover jazz and classical music. It’s fantastic,” she highlighted.
