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Flare Entertainment Boosts Series Production With Berlin Drug Family Drama, Near-Future Dystopian Tale (EXCLUSIVE)

Berlin-based Flare Film is ramping up series production with two new high-concept projects in development while currently producing the eight-part “Paradiso” for Sky Deutschland, the first project from the company’s recently launched Flare Entertainment division.

Flare Entertainment is partnering with Beta Film and Deutsche Telekom streaming platform MagentaTV on “The Daughter,” created by Pola Beck (“Breaking Horizons,” “The Last Word”) and the writing trio known locally as the HaRiBos, Hanno Hackfort, Richard Kropf and Bob Konrad (“You Are Wanted,” “4 Blocks”), with Beck and Kropf serving as showrunners.

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The series tells the fact-based story of Tinka, a directionless teenager forced to grow up overnight when her wealthy parents are arrested for running the biggest cocaine ring in Berlin. As she works to free them from jail, she uncovers their secret lives and delves ever deeper into the family business.

Described as “Breaking Bad” meets French cinema, the eight-part family drama examines the shifting power dynamics between a daughter and her parents while also exploring the high society drug scene of West Berlin. It is in the bars and clubs located in the posh neighborhoods of Schöneberg, Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg and Steglitz where the family finds its rich and beautiful clients.

Flare Entertainment is also developing “Ship of Fools,” a story set in 2031, a time in which the world economy has hit rock bottom and natural disasters, poverty and crime are on the rise. As democracies around the world fail, a new society emerges in Germany, a utopian but insidious new order. All those who might represent a danger to this new social order are identified and dealt with – before they become perpetrators. When young family man Markus is unexpectedly committed to a psychiatric clinic, his girlfriend Etna joins a radical protest movement in an effort to save him, putting their family’s future at stake.

The eight-part series is written by Thomas Gerhold and Julia Langhof, who is also set to direct.

Flare Film managing director and producer Martin Heisler says the company continues to focus on both feature films and series, but notes that “series are at the center of the focus these days.”

“Paradiso” began filming last fall in Italy and production has continued with on-location shoots in Germany, Bulgaria, Finland, New York and South America. The series is set to premiere on Sky in 2022.

Based on the novel “Funeral for a Dog” by Thomas Pletzinger, who also penned the series with Hackfort and Konrad, “Paradiso” follows journalist Daniel Mandelkern as he travels to Italy for an interview with celebrated German writer Mark Svensson, who is living in seclusion. While there, Mandelkern becomes entangled in the mystery of a missing person and in a story seemingly straight out of Svensson’s novel: a love triangle that begins in Colombia, blossoms in Finland and breaks up in New York.

“Paradiso” stars Friedrich Mücke (“Balloon”), Albrecht Schuch (“Bad Banks”), Alina Tomnikov (“Arctic Circle”), Ina Geraldine Guy, Daniel Sträßer (“Tatort”) and Anne Ratte-Polle (“Dark”).

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