With Ron Leshem, the executive producer of the popular television series Euphoria, was wondering where he should present his new series bad boy, While filming an Israeli drama about juvenile prisons, he decided to set his sights on the Toronto film festival.
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“Normally we would have chosen a television festival. But we felt that this series was a cinematic creation and that it needed a film festival,” Mr Leshem explained in an interview with AFP.
That argument, he and Bad Boy co-creator Hagar Ben-Asher, aren’t the only ones they’ve had. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which has served as a launching pad for many Oscar-winning films, is now also emerging as a springboard for prestige television, as its 2023 schedule shows.
Netflix unveiled the first episode of its highly anticipated miniseries “All the Light We Cannot See,” a World War II epic based on the novel “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr and starring Mark Ruffalo .
Amazon’s Prime Video channel also introduced “Expats,” a Hong Kong-set drama about the intertwined lives of the city’s rich and poor expats, starring Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman.
According to TIFF boss Cameron Bailey, this programming expansion is the result of “series growth and true integration between those who make series and those who make feature films.”
Series “that travel light”
Bad Boy, which is still looking for a Toronto station, looks at the true and surreal story of Israeli comedian Daniel Chen, who was locked up in a juvenile detention center as a child.
The series, shot in Hebrew, shows that 20 years later, the secrets of his past remain a burden and a constant threat.
As Leshem and Ben-Asher explain, the teenager then known as Dean learned to survive behind bars with humor.
“It’s not a dark story. “It’s the story of a man whose talent emerged in a very, very difficult place,” Ben-Asher told AFP.
Mr. Leshem explains that they rejected an American studio’s offer to produce Bad Boy in English from the start. “We wanted the freedom to make it as authentic as possible.”
Subtitles are no longer the death knell for television series: the global success of series like Narcos and Squid Game shows that audiences are not afraid to consume content in a language other than their own.
“That is the strength of television today. Different stories can be spread easily,” says Ben-Asher.
All the Light We Cannot See, premiering on Netflix November 2, tells the story of a young blind French girl and a young German soldier whose lives collide in the occupied French city of Saint-Malo and under the bombs.
Director Lulu Wang, known for her film The Farewell, chose to reveal the penultimate episode of Expats instead of the first because she believed there were “multiple ways to approach a story.”
In the series based on the novel “The Expatriates” by Janice YK Lee, Nicole Kidman plays the role of an American mother who experiences a family tragedy.
Expats is scheduled to air on Prime Video in 2024.
Nicole Kidman and Mark Ruffalo didn’t attend the premieres as Hollywood actors and writers were still on strike.