‘Paradys,’ a Bold South African Crime Thriller From Keshet International, Wins Series Mania’s Forum Award

variety.com:

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentTicking multiple boxes, and a competition frontrunner,  “Paradys” walked off on Tuesday night with the Series Mania Forum Best Project Award, the biggest industry plaudit at one of Europe’s largest TV festivals.A novel crime drama “Paradys” is produced by South Africa’s Quizzical Pictures and Keshet International, which also handles international distribution.

The project was pitched at Series Mania by Quizzical producer Nimrod Geva and creator-writer Darrel Bristow-Bovey.Carrying a €50,000 ($55,000) cash prize, the award marks a triumph for Keshet International’s ever more expansive production reach, and for Johannesburg-based Quizzical Pictures, part of South Africa’s burgeoning premium series production scene and a Rose D’Or-winning production company for “Hopeville.” The series is also the first from South Africa selected for the Forum’s Co-Pro Pitching Sessions, its industry centrepiece.Also created by Anton Visser and executive produced by Avi Nir for Keshet International, “Paradys” turns on two Black police officers called in to investigate a brutal murder in Paradys, the last whites-only enclave in South Africa, a town in the northwest dry bush country on the banks of the Orange River. “They must work together to navigate an upside-down world of shifting allegiances, apocalyptic cults, and covert interference from the American alt-right to finally uncover a truth that is neither black nor white,” the synopsis runs. “Paradys” is described by its makers as a “tense, character-driven murder mystery.”“As South Africans who have lived through Apartheid, we’re shocked by how the Western world’s future is starting to resemble our country’s past,” Geva told Variety when the.