News

Prominent Chilean TV producer Maria Elena Wood, a producer on “News of a Kidnapping,” “Dignity” and “Mary & Mike,” is teaming with multi-prized TV toon series director Bernardita Ojeda, helmer of two-time Intl. Emmy nominee “Petit,” to make 2D “Lucila,” both Wood and Ojeda’s first animated feature.

“I am amazed at [animation’s] narrative possibilities,” Wood enthused to Variety.

In a Chilean power package, Patricio Pereira, EP on “Dignity” and “Mary & Mike,” and Alvaro Ceppi, director of “Zumbástico Fantástico” and 2Paper Port,” have also boarded “Lucila” as exec producers.

Written by Argentine live action director Fernando Salem (“How Most Things Work”) and Chilean author Álvaro Bisama, “Lucila” is set to make its market debut at this year’s Animation! Pitching Sessions. Part of Buenos Aires’ Ventana Sur, backed by the Cannes Film Festival and Marché du Film and Argentina’s Incaa film-tv agency and organized with the Annecy Film Festival,...

For 25 years, from 1992’s “La Frontera” through 2017’s ”A Fantastic Woman,” a subsequent Oscar winner, the Berlinale has prized a rich trove of Chilean movies.

Now, in sync with industry change, Berlin will celebrate the country’s TV with a Chilean Series on the Rise showcase, part of its Country Focus.

“When I started at CinemaChile, one mandate was to achieve the same sense of a phenomenon for Chilean series that had happened in film,” says Constanza Arena, executive director.

Berlin lifts the curtain on early success. “TV is the future of content,” says Matías Cardone, producer of “Dignity,” as the showcase comes in as a Country Focus’ centerpiece.

The five series presented have won big prizes, struck high-profile deals and helped bow original series investment and marked a major strategic departure at some of the world’s most energetic drama series players.

Haunting vignettes of desaparecidos under Pinochet and...

Director of global contents and international businesses at Argentine broadcast network Telefe over 2011-16, Tomas Yankelevich steered it into a modern broadcast age. That meant repositioning it as a proactive content factory, not a passive distributor. Another move was a drive it into international-standard content production and ownership via shorter-format fiction and co-development and production alliances from 2015 with Keshet Intl., Endemol Shine and FremantleMedia, which gave Telefe a cut in international IPs.

Relocating from Buenos Aires to Miami and Telefe to Turner Latin America after Viacom’s purchase of Telefé in November 2016, Yankelevich, now Evp & Chief Content Officer, general entertainment, Turner Latin America, is one executive at the controls of another partial strategic makeover, this time of Turner Latin America, fast emerging as one of Latin America’s premium content production powerhouses. In an interview, Yankelevich takes Variety through the main paradigm shifts, product of sea-change in the content industry and consumer habits at large.