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Toledo, Spain — Global producer-distributor Fremantle has dropped an international trailer for “Negotiator,” a sleek, slick and chic eight-part São Paulo crime thriller produced by two prominent players on the Latino and Latin-American TV scene – Miami-based Spiral International and Brazil’s Boutique Filmes.

Acquiring world rights outside Latin America and Portugal, Fremantle will use Conecta Fiction in Toledo, Spain to introduce “Negotiator,” which underscores building market trends coursing through the international TV scene.

The busy trailer begins with a desperate kidnapper bursting through big church doors, revolver in hand pointing to a victim’s head. “I’m going to kill him,” he shouts hysterically.

Cut in counter-shot to a close up of the late-‘30s granite featured face of Captain Gabriel Menck (Malvino Salvador), head of negotiations for Gate, a special police unit charged with resolving crisis situations across Brazil’s São Paulo. “Nobody dies today,” Menck states categorically.

“I understand your suffering,...

It may well be an unconscious impulse but the writers are directly or indirectly influenced by their socio-political millieu, even when opposing it, and you don’t need to be a Marxist to acknowledge that.

As Edward Said showed in his examination of ‘Orientalism’, or recent works showcasing the overt or covert politics of such literary figures as William Wordsworth (Jonathan Bate’s "Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World") and Jane Austen, politics can intrude into the poetic realm or comedies of manners — or other forms of fiction, too. And this can span the entire gamut from literary classics to pulp fiction.

The Cold War is a fitting example. As two contrasting systems of social and political organisation vied for global influence, the conflict for influencing hearts and minds underpinned the diplomatic and military manoeuvres.

Duncan White’s "Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War" (2019) offers...