News

With over 250 screen adaptations featuring Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is one of the most famous characters to have graced a screen. But few of those adaptations have come from non-English speaking countries.

In the new Russian TV series, “Sherlock: The Russian Chronicles,” which transfers Sherlock Holmes to Saint Petersburg in 1889 to hunt down notorious killer Jack the Ripper, international audiences will now get a chance to discover the revered detective through a completely new lens.

Zdf Enterprises has just secured global distribution rights for the original series, produced by the Russian streaming service Start and production company Sreda.

The character of Sherlock Holmes, which British author Doyle first brought to life in 1887 in the novel “A Study of Scarlet,” has gone on to have a life of his own since that time, adapted not only in film and TV, but also gaining huge success on stage,...

Kyrgyz and Russian director Nurbek Egen is best known for feature films “The Wedding Chest” and “The Empty Home,” and he more recently transitioned to TV with the 2017 series “Two Against Death.” He is now making a play for international audiences with high-end show “Sherlock: The Russian Chronicles,” produced by Russia’s Yellow, Black and White group, and penned by Oleg Malovichko (“Sputnik”). The show is being presented to international buyers at Roskino’s Key Buyers Event this week. Egen took questions from Variety about putting a new spin on the famous detective. Excerpts.

How did you frame the narrative to make it both Russian and fresh?

In our series Sherlock Holmes travels to Russia alone, without his close friend Watson, in order to catch Jack the Ripper, whom Sherlock has been chasing from the U.K. Watson can’t travel with Holmes, since the good doctor was wounded by...

Turkish film ‘The Announcement’ picked up two awards.

Robert Budina’s mountain-set family drama A Shelter Among The Clouds was the key winner at Kosovo’s PriFest in Pristina on Sunday (July 21), taking home three prizes including the best Balkan film award.

The Albania-Romania co-production also received the best actor and actress prizes for Kosovan actors Arben Bajraktari and Irena Cahani respectively.

It centres on the religious divisions between an extended family in an Albanian mountain community.

The film premiered at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia in November 2018, where Screen’s review described it as “visually arresting…evocatively...