Rome’s MIA market dedicated to international TV series, animation, feature films, and documentaries is set to feature a panoply of 62 projects from 36 countries for its upcoming 9th edition.
Though European content remains the core of the curated pre-Mipcom event that will run Oct. 9-13 in the central Rome’s Palazzo Barberini – which besides being Italy’s National Ancient Art gallery, is also the market’s main hub – organisers on Thursday announced that this year more than 500 entries were submitted from 80 countries which they said marks a 30% increase in terms of national provenance.
MIA (whose whose acronym stands for the Mercato Internazionale Audiovisivo or International Audiovisual Market) is headed by Gaia Tridente.
Standout projects that made the cut for MIA comprise groundbreaking Romanian animator Anca Damian’s “Motherhood,” described as a poetic journey into female body and desire, illustrated by Italian artist Virginia Mori and co-produced by French studio Miyu Productions; “Letizia Battaglia: Her Name is Battle,” a doc about the late great photographer who chronicled years of Sicilian Mafia bloodshed in Palermo; the high-profile TV series “A Thousand Times at Dawn,” based on the novel “Tre volte all’alba” by prominent Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco, produced by Domenico Procacci and Laura Paolucci for Fandango; and the feature film “A Story of Three Girls” by Turkey’s Nursen Çetin Köreken in which the world of female weightlifting provides a backdrop to stories of three girls struggling to assert their identity in the complex reality of contemporary Turkey.
As previously announced, this year’s MIA speakers include Nicole Clemens, president of Paramount Television Studios and Paramount+ original scripted series; Sara Bernstein, president of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries; Marge Dean, head of Skybound Entertainment’s animation studio and president of Women in Animation; “Waltz With Bashir” director Ari Folman; Nicholas Weinstock, founder and president of Invention Studios and “Severance” producer; and James Townley, chief content officer of development at Banijay.
