Erotic Lives of the Superheroes, a cancer tragicomedy, killer women, and more were among the show pitches presented during the Industry Days program of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) on Tuesday.
The festival’s inaugural Pop-Up Series Incubator, organized in partnership with broadcaster and entertainment giant Central European Media Enterprises, featured five original European series projects and ideas, typically based on novels.
Below, THR has compiled a look at the projects that took the spotlight at Karlovy Vary and highlights from their creators’ pitches to industry representatives.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes
Based on: La Vita Erotica Dei Superuomini by Marco Mancassola
Countries: France
Scriptwriters: Eric Dupont, Ruddy-Williams Kabuiku, Nadya Todorova
Producer: Eric Dupont
Language: English
Genre: crime thriller, superhero
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes, courtesy of KVIFF
Synopsis: “When disgraced superheroes start dying exactly as he sees in his dreams, a hard-drinking paparazzo and his estranged detective twin sister are pulled into a hunt for a killer hiding dangerously close to home.”
Pitch highlights: “It’s about what happens when the people we want to worship end up selling out, and we realized that no one is coming to save us,” explained Dupont.
Todorova shared two key things that are different about the show. “We’re stripping away this glossiness to heroism and really exposing the fragile and the very self-destructive people that are behind the masks, and are probably behind the mask of every superhero show, but we don’t know, except in our show, we do know,” she said. “The second big thing is that the powers here feel more like wounds rather than the gifts that they are in the regular, generic superhero genre. They are wounds that amplify the trauma rather than resolve it.”
Concluded Kabuiku: “We bring the superhero genre home, because originally, superheroes were a European thing. But how do we do it, because it’s hard to compete with the Americans. So, with the superpowers we use, we go towards something that is more grounded in realism.” For example, one character is a shape shifter, but her power “at some point turns into some kind of curse, because she can’t remember her own face.”
Therapies
Based on a play by Birutė Kapustinskaitė
Country: Lithuania
Directed by: Birute Kapustinskaite, Marija Katvaradzė
Scriptwriter: Birutė Kapustinskaitė, Ruxandra Ghitescu, Fabrizio Muscia
Producer: Dagnė Vildžiūnaitė
Language: Lithuanian
Genre: tragicomic slice of life
Therapies, courtesy of KVIFF
Synopsis: “When a sharp-tongued professor checks into a remote hospital expecting peace and privacy during chemotherapy, she ends up in a six-bed cancer ward full of loud, impossible-to-ignore women, including her old college nemesis. Beating cancer might be the goal, but first, they’ll have to survive each other. As gossip spreads, WhatsApp groups form, and crystal healing sessions clash with silent hours, the ward becomes its own dysfunctional universe. Amid the absurdity, the women slowly chip away at each other’s defences – finding unexpected friendship, meaning, and a strange kind of freedom. A slice-of-life existential comedy about illness, control, and letting go.”
Pitch highlights: “My mother had cancer, and I used to go with her to every chemo session she had at the hospital,” said Kapustinskaitė. “She stayed there for three nights, so I stayed with her, and some of the women were the same each time. We could follow the journey together with them, and while I was staying there, I realized that they are so interesting and they are so different that I told my mother that I was going to write a play about it. My mother didn’t make it, but the play did.”
Ghitescu was attracted by “the emotional honesty at the basis of the story,” she said. “The story is not a story about illness. It becomes a story about how life just keeps going.”
Muscia offered that “the show really stands apart from the other shows dealing with cancer in a way that, instead of exotifying the illness, really embraces it as a natural part of life.” After all, “when you get such a diagnosis, you still have to deal with all the issues that you have, and cancer is just another thing on top.”
The Three Burials of Irma
Based on: Alfatride (O iatrodikastis) by Vassilis Vassilikos
Countries: Greece, Luxembourg, Switzerland
Directed by: Elina Psykou
Scriptwriter: Elina Psykou, Lemba de Miranda
Producer: Fenia Cossovitsa
Languages: English, Greek, German, Italian
Genre: neo-noir, thriller
The Three Burials of Irma, courtesy of KVIFF
Synopsis: “1973. At the height of the Greek junta, Irma is murdered by her husband, a tycoon, on their private island. When the coroner is called upon by the tycoon to cover up the crime, Maria, the coroner’s wife, tries to prevent it, and she mysteriously loses her voice. As Irma’s dead body becomes a battlefield, Bianca, a lost Italian girl, grows close to the coroner’s young assistant. Together, in a misguided act of supposed social justice, they kidnap the tycoon’s son. In a final act of defiance, Maria publicly denounces Irma’s femicide and her husband’s complicity and commits suicide. The junta sends a tank crashing through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic, suppressing the student uprising. Bianca, betrayed by the coroner’s assistant, emerges from the chaos, but for the first time, she is truly free.”
Pitch highlights: The team showed a teaser that included the tagline: “Patriarchy kills.”
Psykou explained that a woman’s “dead body becomes the battlefield for power games and is buried, literally and metaphorically, more than once.” She added: “We follow things from the point of view of two women and their efforts to reveal the truth about Irma’s death, and generally about all these murders by the junta, and to fight against patriarchy and seek justice.”
Several aspects attracted de Miranda. “First of all, it’s this distinct arena. We see Greece as the cradle of civilization and democracy, and at that time, that cradle was under the military junta. I think also that the story revolves around women who have an unspoken pact and try to fight for justice at a time when women in Greece or wherever in the world didn’t have a real voice.”
The Night of the Beguines
Based on: La Nuit des Béguines by Aline Kiner
Countries: France, Belgium, Italy
Directed by: David Roux
Scriptwriter: David Roux, Yaël Kayam
Producer: Candice Zaccagnino, Olivier Aknin
Camera: Aurélien Marra, Augustin Barbaroux
Music: Quentin Sirjacq
Language: French
Genre: historical thriller
The Night of the Beguines, courtesy of KVIFF
Synopsis: “Set in 14th-century Paris, a community of independent women – the Beguines – face rising danger after their visionary spiritual leader, Marguerite Porete, is arrested for heresy. At the heart of the turmoil stands Ysabel, the community’s elected leader, a woman with a hidden past and a dangerous secret: she is the only one who holds the last surviving copy of Marguerite’s banned book, rumoured to possess dark powers. As the Inquisition closes in and fear spreads like wildfire, Ysabel must decide whether to destroy the book to save the sanctuary – or protect it, save its spirit, and risk everything: The sanctuary. The women. And Herself. A gripping historical drama about forbidden knowledge, female resistance, and the price of freedom in an oppressive age.”
Pitch highlights: Roux shared that Natalie Portman would be his dream actress to cast in the project. “The story is all about freedom, early feminism and women’s solidarity,” he said.
“Now is a period when women’s voices or women in different places in the world are still struggling and losing things that they already achieved regarding their personal freedom,” Kayam highlighted. “And I think it’s time to bring those voices back
Zaccagnino highlighted the universality and broad appeal of the story. “For me, it is just as international as The Da Vinci Code or The Name of the Rose,” she said. “The quest is very strong. We are very ambitious about this.”
Angelmaker
Based on: the true story of The Angel Makers of Nagyrév
Countries: Romania, Czech Republic, Germany
Directed by: Cristina Groșan
Scriptwriter: Cristina Groșan, Loïc Barrère, Leana Jalukse
Producer: Anda Ionescu
Camera: Márk Győri
Languages: Hungarian, German, Czech, Romanian
Genre: revisionist western, dark comedy
Angelmaker, courtesy of KVIFF
Synopsis: “While the men were at war, the women kept the village running, and they did just fine. They worked, drank, even took lovers from the enemy’s side. But when peace comes and the men return, furious and ready to reclaim control, something shifts. There’s no help coming. So Hilda offers a quick fix: hard-to-detect arsenic. One drop calms him; the whole bottle ends it. Together with nurse Carina, they turn survival into a system. A council forms. Poison becomes policy. But what starts as homemade justice now begins to rot. The cemetery overflows with fresh graves. And a curious General comes poking around. Still, everything is running smoother than ever.”
Pitch highlights: The team showed a teaser that ended with the tagline: “Welcome to the village. Try not to eat the stew.”
Groșan noted how real-life stories made their way into the project. “There are true accounts of women in the early 20th century who lived in a village, and they had trouble with their husbands, but there was no police in the village,” she said. “They had no money of their own. There was no way to get a divorce. So, they turned to something else, which was hard to detect, arsenic poison.”
She added: “First, it was something about survival, but the method proved quite popular, and soon they were poisoning anyone they didn’t like.”
Meanwhile, Ionescu shared: “I was really drawn to this blurred line between right and wrong and how far we can stretch it.”
Asked if the series has a Breaking Bad vibe, Jalukse said: “It is a bit of a Breaking Bad story, yeah. But in the end, our [characters] want to break back good again, but then it might be too late.”
Barrère told the audience that whenever he decides ona new project, ge asks himself if he would watch it himself. “In this case, the answer was obvious. I really wanted to see a group of women taking down men and moving [against] the patriarchy,” he said. “There’s a deep contemporary relevance in the themes explored.It’s very close to my own life and to our times. Power must be seized. It will not be handed to you.”