“Il Cacciatore” [ The Hunter] is the only Italian TV series in competition at CanneSeries, the new television series festival directed by Benoît Louvet which will open on 4th April with the premiere of “Versailles 3” and end on 11th April with the live broadcast of the award ceremony on Canal +.
“To be one of the ten projects in competition out of the 500 candidates and to be brought into the international limelight fills us with pride” emotionally comments director Stefano Lodovichi,
“also because the jury features names of the caliber of Michael Kenneth Williams (star of “The Wire”), Audrey Fouché (one of the scriptwriters on “Les Reventants”), and Cristobal Tapia de Veer (the composer on series like “Black Mirror”)”.
Lodovichi together with Davide Marengo directed the crime series starring Francesco Montanari and Miriam Dalmazio which, in 12 x 50 minute episodes, tells the story of Alfonso Sabella, a lawyer who, in the 1990s, sent some of the most dangerous and cruel bosses in the modern Sicilian Mafia to prison like Leoluca Bagarella and Giovanni Brusca.
The world premiere will be in Cannes on 9th April while Italian viewers have already been watching the series on Rai 2 since 14th March (the first two episodes achieved a share of 10.4%).
According to Lodovichi the series has three strong points: the great attention paid to the quality of the writing, the decision to count on a young team, allowing them full freedom of expression, and a genre such as crime linked to a theme that has always attracted a global interest in Italy.
Alfonso Sabella on whose autobiography “Cacciatore di mafiosi” [Mafia hunter] the series is based, collaborated on the script, “together with a magnificent group of writers – led by the two head writers, Silvia Ebreul and Marcello Izzo – in which I also participated, handling the artistic supervision of the writing of the first six episodes which are the ones I directed”, continues Lodovichi.
“Then I wrote the screenplay for the fourth episode and for the fifth one together with Fabio Paladini, the creative producer, who did a magnificent job of linking the artistic and production worlds. Then the last six episodes also feature the hand of Marzio Paoltroni”.
Filmed last year over 26 weeks in and around Palermo (Piana degli Albanesi, Mondello, Isola delle Femmine) and Rome, with the support of the Roma Lazio Film Commission and the Sicilia Film Commission, the series is produced by Cross Productions and Beta Film in collaboration with Rai Fiction.
Lodovichi explains: “I found myself in optimal conditions for doing my job: neither Rai nor Cross Production, in the person of Rosario Rinaldo, set me any limits, even for the most violent or risqué scenes. I had an opportunity to create a world and a language, also shared with Davide Marengo, that worked. Basically the producers agreed take a risk with me, trusting me to also choose my co-workers, all young people and more or less newcomers to television: from the director of photography Benjamin Meier, to the composer Giorgio Giampà, to the editor Francesco Di Stefano”.
CanneSeries will also give space to short formats with the dedicated competition CanneSeries Digital on 11th April which features a prevalence of non-European products (apart from one Spanish one and two co-productions with France).
Also organized in collaboration with MIPTV is In Development, the creative forum that will host the pitches of 12 projects which could win development funding from the forum’s official partners, specifically the European producer Federation Entertainment (“The Bureau”), and the French think-tank La Fabrique des Formats.
The eight international students from the CanneSeries Institute, a series writing residency course held from 5th March to 11th April in Cannes, supervised by the University of Côte d’Azur (UCA), and Serial Eye, a writing residency course in Berlin, will also participate in the professional meetings organized by In Development.
