Norwegian comedy series Power Play has won Best Series in the Canneseries International Competition.
The series — originally called Makta and written by Silje Storstein, Kristin Grue and Johan Fasting — is for Norwegian pubcaster NRK and NDR and is from Motlys and Fremantle-owned Novemberfilm. REinvent International Sales has distribution rights.
Fasting (Heimebane, Ninjababy) is the showrunner and Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, Jan Gunnar Røise star.
Power Play is billed as “the incredible story of Gro Harlem Brundtland, who in the late 70s works as a young doctor, fighting for self-determined abortion, when she almost by accident, stumbles into politics. As the government implodes around her, Gro learns to play her own games of power, climbing the ranks until she is the last woman standing in the ruins of Labour’s celebrated social democracy, ending up as Norway’s first female Prime Minister in 1981.”
The 12-part series also bagged Best Music with Kåre Christoffer Vestrheim, Andrea Louise Horstad, Kristoffer Lo and Eivind Helgerød credited as overseeing that element of the program.
Best Screenplay went to Korea’s Bargain, which had its international premiere at the Cannes, France festival. Woo-Sung Jeon, Byeong-Yun Choi and Jae-Min Kwak wrote the scripts.
The six-episode series, from SLL and Climax Studio, is for Korean streamer TVING and Paramount+, with Paramount Global Content Distribution attached for sales. It follows a man who unintentionally ends up in an auction house for human organ trafficking, with his body parts for sale. Just as his kidney is sold, an earthquake collapses the building and the plot gets going — quite the script.
It went out last year in Korea.
Other winners at the Canneseries awards, held this evening in the French city, include Israeli series Corduroy and Carthago, which took the Best Performance and Special Interpretation Awards respectively, and The Left-Handed Son, which won the short form competition. Belgian doc series Draw For Change!, about female cartoonists, won Best Documentary Series.
This was the sixth Canneseries. The festival runs adjacent to Mip TV, which finished today after three days of sales meetings, keynotes and conference sessions.
