Two French series, Funny and Oussekine will have opened, on March 18, then closed, this Friday, March 25, the Series Mania festival, in Lille, in style each time. And it’s still a hexagonal series, The world of tomorrow, who won the grand prize in the international competition. Organized six months after the previous one, postponed due to the pandemic, this edition affirmed the ability of French fiction to seduce its audiences and claim its place on the international scene. An influence made easier by the presence of its productions on the platforms.
Oussekine, ample and moving evocation of the death of the young demonstrator under the blows of the police in 1986, will be available before the end of the year on Disney +, Funny watch on Netflix. As to tomorrow’s world, a Time.news of the early years of hip-hop in France, centered around the characters of Joey Starr, Kool Shen and Dee Nasty, it will be visible in the fall on Arte before the series migrates to Netflix; it is the perfect example of a story written as a series (under the leadership of the duo Vincent Poymiro-David Elkaim) and directed as a feature film (by filmmakers Hélier Cisterne and Katell Quillévéré).
The jurors of the international competition, under the aegis of the Ukrainian producer Julia Sinkevych, presented the interpretation prizes to Michelle De Swarte, who plays a woman reluctant to motherhood that the fate afflicts with an infernal baby in the comedy black british The Baby, and to Judah Levy for his role as a rabbi caught in a furious succession dispute within an Orthodox community, in Fire Dance, signed by Israeli filmmaker Ramah Burstein.
Social issues in the spotlight
The rest of this international selection was essentially devoted to the analysis and criticism of various institutions: the French army, in Sentinels which depicts an army unit during operation “Barkhane” in Mali (on OCS on April 5), an Italian prison in He re (the king), the police of Baltimore in the United States in We Own This City (still on OCS, April 26) or finance and international trade in the intriguing Transport, Finnish series which depicts an international traffic of horsemeat.
Each in their own way, these stories – of which, it is the rule of the game of the festival, we discovered the first two or three episodes – use the division and the duration specific to the serial form to dissect the contradictions of an organization, the discrepancies between what its members say and what they do.
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