City Ufa Showbiz Latest News and Updates

Manchester City have reportedly agreed a deal with Arsenal for Oleksandr Zinchenko.

Morgan Freeman, Olivier Marchal and Simone Ashley will be lauded at the Monte-Carlo TV Festival in June. Prince Albert II of Monaco will present Freeman with Festival’s Crystal Nymph award.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Morgan Freeman will receive the Crystal Nymph Award at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival, which runs June 14-18 in Monaco. Freeman will receive the award at the opening ceremony from Prince Albert II of Monaco, in recognition of his television career.

Tennis superstar Aryna Sabalenka has been left heartbroken after her partner Konstantin Koltsov tragically passed away aged 42. Konstantin, an impressive ice hockey star turned coach, was staying in Florida with the Australian Open champ when he sadly died from a "detached blood clot".

Ed Meza @edmezavar Variety’s Series Mania Bulletin highlights breaking news at this year’s French TV festival: Paramount+ has announced the schedule and pricing for its international ad-supported Basic subscription offering and Premium plan, both set to begin this month in selected countries. The ad-supported Basic plan will be available in April in Canada and in June in Australia, priced at $6.99 in Canadian and Australian dollars.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Spinning audiences back to the mid-1970s, UFA Fiction‘s latest period series “Disko 76” is set in a pivotal time in the industrial heartland of West Germany as a new American pop music craze takes over the airwaves and dance floors. The six-part series, which premiered at the recent Berlinale Series Market, continues its international rollout at Series Mania in Lille before bowing on the RTL+ streaming platform on March 28 and on RTL Group channel Nitro on April 1. UFA Fiction quickly won over RTL+ with the idea from former UFA Fiction producer Benjamin Benedict of a family story set in the disco era, says fellow producer Sinah Swyter.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Media and entertainment powerhouse Banijay has launched joint venture Dynamic Ally Pictures in Germany, further expanding its scripted capacity in the country. The Berlin-based production company, founded and led by “Helgoland 513” executive producers Veronica Priefer and Johannes Kunkel, is dedicated to developing, packaging and distributing scripted content for the German and international market.

Banijay Germany has taken another step into the scripted market by launching a joint venture with the executive producers behind Helgoland 513.

Two heavyweights of German television and film are uniting.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Iconic German film and TV executive Jan Mojto is launching a partnership with longstanding friend and UFA head Nico Hofmann that will produce German and European series and films for the international market. They are joined in the unnamed venture by Beta producer Jan Wünschmann. The partnership was announced Wednesday, on the eve of the annual Berlin Film Festival.

Germany‘s UFA Group has brought in a senior Netflix exec, as part of a management re-org.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Former UFA executive Katja Bäuerle has become CEO of the Erich Pommer Institut, a professional training institution in Potsdam-Babelsberg, near Berlin, affiliated with the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. Bäuerle is a producer and manager with decades of experience in production, team leadership and communication.

UFA’s long-serving CEO Nico Hofmann is stepping down from his post and becoming Chairman of Fremantle’s German powerhouse, with former RTL and exec Sascha Schwingel replacing him.

K.J. Yossman Apple TV+ has set its first German-language series, “Where’s Wanda?” “Where’s Wanda?” tells the story of a couple desperate to find their missing daughter. After months of waiting for the police to track her down, Dedo and Carlotta Klatt finally take matters into their own hands.

Apple TV+ has greenlit its first project out of Germany.

EXCLUSIVE: Germany’s top scripted conference Seriencamp is headed for a new home in Cologne this summer, and its line-up is coming together.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Germany’s impressive crop of crime drama, mystery, suspense, apocalyptic catastrophe, royal intrigue and tales of the supernatural is certain to attract buyers at this year’s MipTV in Cannes. The selections of series, TV movies and unscripted shows offer a wide range of content but also remain heavy on crime — a favorite German genre.  Among the new offerings is Beta Film’s fact-based title “I am Scrooge.” Produced by Zeitsprung Pictures, the Cologne-based company behind the hit Netflix spy thriller “Kleo,” “I am Scrooge” chronicles the true story of Arno Funke, a frustrated artist who found fame as a bombmaking extortionist in the early 1990s. 

The German-based distribution and production company Port au Prince Film And Kultur Produktion has hired Roshanak “Rosh” Khodabakhsh as a producer and executive board member.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Variety has been given access to the international trailer (below) for “A Thousand Lines,” by one of Germany’s most successful directors, Michael Bully Herbig (“Manitou’s Shoe”), and starring two of its leading actors, Elyas M’Barek (“Fuck You Göhte”) and Jonas Nay (“Deutschland 83”). The film opened via Warner Bros. across German-speaking Europe two weeks ago. Beta Cinema is presenting it to buyers at AFM. “A Thousand Lines” – a blend of satire, drama and comedy – is written by Hermann Florin, inspired by Juan Moreno’s “Tausend Zeilen Lüge.” It is the fictional adaptation of one of Germany’s biggest media scandals. The story centers on freelance journalist Juan Romero, played by M’Barek, who encounters inconsistencies in a cover story by award-winning reporter Lars Bogenius, played by Nay.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Fatih Akin has teamed up with Berlin-based UFA Fiction on his miniseries about German star Marlene Dietrich, starring Diane Kruger. Based on the biography “My Mother Marlene,” by Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, the five-part series, tentatively titled “Marlene,” is produced by UFA Fiction and Akin’s Bombero International in Hamburg. Currently in production, the miniseries chronicles Dietrich’s life as an artist, lover, German emigrant and mother as well as a woman who created her own rules and lived by them, whatever the cost. “‘Marlene’ will be not only the first series I have written and directed but also the greatest challenge in my film career,” said Akin, the series’ creator.

Amazon has unveiled its 2022-23 German originals slate as it up investment in the country, with new Prime Video comedy shows and the latest All or Nothing soccer doc among the highlights. At the same time, Prime Video Channels will soon offer Discovery+ and Paramount+ as add-ons.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief

EJ Panaligan editorThe long-running U.S. game show “Let’s Make a Deal” will expand into eight new international territories in a new deal brokered by Marcus/Glass Productions and Can’t Stop Media, an international sales group.The gamer, which is hosted by Wayne Brady and produced by Fremantle for CBS in the U.S., is aiming to expand to Germany, Indonesia, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Hungary, Ireland and Poland under new deals.

Naman Ramachandran Sky original drama series “The Lovers,” starring Johnny Flynn (“Beast”) and Roisin Gallagher (“The Fall”) has commenced production. The six-part series, written by playwright David Ireland (“Cyprus Avenue”) and directed by Justin Martin (“Together”), follows Janet (Gallagher), a foul-mouthed, disaffected Belfast supermarket worker and Seamus (Flynn) a self-centred, political broadcaster with what looks to be a perfect London life and a celebrity girlfriend.

An apocalyptic drama from the makes of Deutschland 83, a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and an emotionally-driven series set in Alabama are European giant Sky Deutschland’s latest trio of original dramas.

EXCLUSIVE: Deutschland 83 co-creator Jörg Winger’s latest drama series Ouija has added Starzplay as co-producer and the show has set cast, Deadline can reveal.

Oleksandr Zinchenko has shared a heartwarming Instagram post regarding a Ukrainian refugee that he invited to train at the Manchester City Football Academy last week.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorGermany has been a source of shows for the international market for decades, but with series like “Deutschland 83” in 2015, and “Babylon Berlin” and “Dark” in 2017, the bar was raised and the sense of what constituted German drama shifted, and international buyers took note.One of them was Christian Vesper, who bought “Deutschland 83” when he was drama chief at Sundance TV. Vesper remembers that at that time it was unheard of for a U.S. channel to buy a German drama.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentFremantle Spain has tapped seasoned Spanish TV exec Fernando Jerez to oversee a new production arm En Cero Coma Producciones, dedicated to factual and documentary program production.The creation of the new label forms just part of Fremantle’s wider global strategy to grow its footprint in the high-end factual space, the company said Thursday.