Estonian producers and companies are looking to reproduce the success of the breakout drama “Traitor” with two new series set for release in 2024.
Financed by Estonian streaming company Elisa and featuring local talent both in front of and behind the camera, “Traitor” was the first domestically produced TV show to have international legs.
“Traitor” tells the story of the biggest spy scandal in Estonian history, when an Estonian defense official was recruited by the Russians in 2004 as the country was set to become the latest member of NATO. Running over two seasons from 2019, the show has been a hit domestically and was distributed internationally by GoQuest Media and will reach U.S. viewers via the Spanish-language streaming platform FlixLatino.
“The best compliment I received at Mipcom in Cannes this year was from an international producer who said they still feel sad they didn’t get ‘Traitor’ back then,” Toomis Ili, the head of content at the streaming platform Elisa, tells Variety. “Fingers crossed that very soon we’ll have other international titles to offer.”
The two as yet untitled shows currently in development are, like “Traitor,” inspired by recent true stories. One features a scam artist who conned millions of euros from multiple women over a couple of years and the second tells the story of a young woman who through familial neglect and the failure of social services gets involved in a spiral of drugs and sex work.
“The stories we tell are not always nice, but they are an important part of our history,” Ili says. Born in the late 1970s, Ili has memories of the Soviet era and the wild west of the post Soviet 1990s, and believes that stories need to reflect that as well as the rich diversity and heritage of Estonian culture. “I remember sitting in a lecture at college when shots were fired just downstairs during an armed robbery where a security guard was killed. It didn’t feel like much at that time. Scary to say, but that was business as usual.”
Part of that Soviet and post-Soviet history has left Estonia with a resource for international filmmakers: the brutalist architecture which Christopher Nolan exploited for an extensive part of “Tenet,” shooting the Linnahall (formerly the V. I. Lenin Palace of Culture and Sports) in Tallinn to stand in for the Kiev Opera House as well as employing the Laagna Road for the highway heist scene. Outside Tallinn, more conventional natural beauty can be found and Film Estonia offers a series of incentives, hoping to attract international filmmakers and show creators.
Elisa has invested significantly in domestic Estonian production, both in film and television, and, as a principal sponsor, has a long relationship with Black Night Film Festival, runs in Tallinn, Estonia, from Nov. 3-19. Festival artistic director Tiina Lokk is a producer, along with Ili and “Traitor” scribe Raoul Suvi, on one of the new TV series set to drop in 2024.
Elisa will also be offering a selection of Black Night films to rent on their platform. In the industry program TV Beats Forum, eight series will be pitched to a jury, including an Estonian project “Behind the Iron Curtain,” with the winner picking up a €3,000 prize. The forum will also include pitch training, one-on-one sessions and panels on co-financing in the region for producers, writers and directors hoping to get their projects off the ground.