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Apple TV+ secured €10m for conspiracy-based psychological thriller drama series Constellation, the maximum amount that the fund can give to a single project.

The German Motion Picture Fund (Gmpf) paid out a record €84.4m in funding in 2022 to 43 high-end series projects by streamers and public broadcasters.

Netflix clinched the largest sum - over €10.38m - for five projects including Constantin Television’s six-part thriller series Liebes Kind, based on the eponymous novel by Romy Hausmann, Real Film’s six-part crime series Sleeping Dog, and W&b Television’s fairytale urban thriller series The Grimm Reality.

Sky was not far behind with...

Eric Welbers, who served as managing director of the production company Ndf until the end of March, has set up the internationally focused content company Bravado Media, with headquarters in Munich.

Bravado has acquired all of Ndf’s shares in Italy’s Viola Film (an 80 stake), headed by Alessandro Passadore, and Belgium-based Bravado Fiction (also an 80 stake), headed by Jan Theys, and Welbers is increasing his stake in Ndf Intl. Production, which he will continue to run together with Matthias Walter.

The new company will make its first market appearance at next week’s trade fair for audiovisual content Mipcom in Cannes.

“Bravado Media will be a contemporary, modern content house: internationally positioned, open-formatted, story-driven, content-oriented,” Welbers said. “Whether it be high-quality TV movies or films for streamers, event series for private and public service partners and, of course, for streaming services. With its unique network of creativity and competence,...

If you live in a country where cable television is not a foreign concept, than chances are you might have bumped into the German television movie Das Jesus Video... or The Hunt for the Hidden Relic... or Ancient Relic... or Hunt for the Jesus Video... There are several titles by which you can find this picture, which was based on the popular novel of Andreas Eschnbach, which mixes the time traveling ideas of Michael Crichton's Timeline with the religious conspiracies of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. In this novel (and movie), a young archeologist finds the skeleton of a time traveler in Israel. Apparently somebody went back in time to make a video recording of Jesus Christ and then hid the casette at a secret location. The German secret service and the Vatican are both interested in the recording and the archeologist ends up in a hi-tech...