The festival launches new section Seminci Series, a showcase of international productions by TV networks and platforms

The festival will screen the US series  The Chosen, a superproduction about the life of Jesus, and the Danish-Swedish co-production The Dark Heart, both distributed by A Contracorriente Films

The section will screen the Spanish documentary series Pacto de silencio. Santiago Corella ‘El Nani’ and the police mafia, produced by RTVE, and PornoXplotación, a Secuoya Studios production directed by Mabel Lozano

This year’s Valladolid International Film Festival is launching the new non-competitive section Seminci Series, a slot dedicated to showcasing international productions for television channels and platforms. The new section’s first edition will programme the fiction productions The Chosen (Dallas Jenkins, United States) and The Dark Heart (Gustav Möller, Denmark/Sweden), together with  the Spanish documentary series Pacto de silencio. Santiago Corella ‘El Nani’ and the police mafia (Ángela Gallardo and César Vallejo, Spain) and PornoXplotación (Mabel Lozano, Spain).

Seminci Series will be screening  the first two episodes of the first season of The Chosen, a series directed by US filmmaker  Dallas Jenkins which has become a worldwide phenomenon. Completely crowd-funded,  it has become an international hit, setting the record for donation-based productions and revolutionising the audiovisual scene. The series is distributed in Spain by A Contracorriente Films.

Translated into 56 languages and with over 420 million views in 142 countries, The Chosen tells for the first time the greatest story ever told in a multi-season series. Focusing on the characters and historical context of the Gospels, the first season of this production features New Testament figures like Peter, Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene, Matthew and, of course, Jesus, in a way never seen before on screen.

The section will also include  five episodes of The Dark Heart (Mörkt hjärta), a Danish-Swedish production directed by Gustav Möller and also distributed by A Contracorriente Films. The series tells the story of two young people in love, Sanna and Marcus. They have grown up on two different farms, just a
couple of hundred meters away from each other, but at the same time worlds apart. Sanna’s father, Bengt, is very powerful in the small village where they live, a millionaire landowner. Marcus’ family are poor white trash whose  failure the family blames on  a conflict that runs generations back.

Spanish productions

Seminci Series will screen two Spanish series. Pacto de silencio. Santiago Corella ‘El Nani’ and the police mafia is an RTVE production directed by Ángela Gallardo and César Vallejo whose first episode will show at the Valladolid Festival.  The series deals with the mediatic case of Santiago Corella, aka ‘El Nani’, a petty criminal from the Spanish slums of the early 1980s who disappeared nearly 39 years ago.

On 13 November 1983, he was arrested for the robbery of a jewellery shop and the murder of its owner, and taken to police headquarters. He was never seen again. The investigation into his disappearance, still unsolved, revealed the existence of a corruption network within the Spanish police. And it gave rise, in 1988, to the first trial fully recorded  by television cameras where, for the first time in the history of
the young Spanish democracy, part of the police elite of those years sat in the dock.

The second Spanish title in this section is PornoXplotación, a Secuoya Studios production directed by Mabel Lozano and  a documentary series based on the book “pornoXplotación”, by Mabel Lozano and Pablo J. Conellie, published by Editorial Alrevés. Seminci Series will program the three chapters of this series, based on several first-person testimonies by victims: a ake-up call about the high price paid for porn on both sides of the screen —by those who star in porn products  and those who consume them— and about the dangers posed by pornography  for future generation. The series discloses the truth about a shady and exploitative industry in order to belie the stereotype of porn as a voluntary activity.

PornoXplotación gathers first-person testimonies and the opinions of experts who help contextualise their experiences and resorts to a visual and narrative approach that makes a difference in the documentary series format: narraturgy. Actresses give voice and face to women who cannot tell us their stories because their lives are in danger. And for the hardest parts, the documentary relies on an evocative technique that also possesses artistic value: animation, this time  in charge of Diego Ingold.

Seminci Series, an heir to “The Series of the Year/TVE”

Seminci Series inherits and updates the spirit of the section “The Series of the Year/TVE”, which the festival programmed between 1984 and 1994 in collaboration with public broadcaster Televisión Española. In fact, Valladolid was the first film festival in Spain to dedicate one section  exclusively to the screening of television series. During this period, the Valladolid Festival premiered titles such as St. Teresa of Avila (1984), by Josefina Molina; Los pazos de Ulloa (1986), by Gonzalo Suárez; Lorca, the Death of a Poet (1987), by Juan Antonio Bardem; Riders of the Dawn  (1990), by Vicente Aranda; Don Quixote (1991), by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón; Una gloria nacional (1992) by Jaime de Armiñán; Un día volveré (1993) by Francesc Beltriú; Historias del otro lado II (1994) by José Luis Garci, and the anthology series La huella del crimen (1985), Amores difíciles (1988) and La mujer de tu vida (1989).