Lux Vide, the Italian company behind high-end series “Medici” and “Leonardo,” has scored international sales on high-concept smaller cop show “Blanca” featuring a blind policewoman specialized in an analytical listening and decoding technique that helps her solve tough cases.
The six-part “Blanca” has been sold by Lux to M6, which is France’s number two terrestrial network, and to Spain’s top linear channel Telecinco, ahead of the show’s Nov. 22 Italian launch on pubcaster RAI’s flagship RAI-1 channel.
Lux Vide sales chief Barbara Pavone said that, besides the deals Lux has sealed with France and Spain, she is in advanced talks to sell “Blanca” in the Nordics and Brazil, as well as to a global streamer.
We are already being asked for the format rights as well, she added, “but we are not selling them at this point, because we want to maximize the value of the readymade.”
The “Blanca” story centers on the eponymous protagonist Blanca Ferrando, played by Maria Chiara Giannetta, a young woman who lost her eyesight as a child. She becomes determined to enter the police force after her older sister dies at the hands of an abusive boyfriend. Her specialty is an analytical listening technique that allows her to hear and decode sounds in wiretaps and other recordings that yield important clues. Helping her in her pursuits are her most trusted friends: guide dog Linnaeus and Stella, a beautician with a very exuberant character.
“There is no rhetoric or pitying” in this show, said Lux Vide CEO Luca Bernabei, who added: “Blanca has transformed her disability in a power. She’s a profiler; she uses her sharpened sense of hearing in investigations.”
“In listening to people she understands if they are lying or not,” Bernabei noted, “and by hearing noises and other sounds she can reconstruct where a homicide has taken place. This gives her an almost supernatural quality.”
“Blanca” is touted as the first production to employ a special recording technique known as holophony which allows the reproduction of sound in a similar way to how it is perceived by the human ear. Listening to the series with simple headphones is meant to help the viewer experience something similar to Blanca. Star Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, who is blind, served as a consultant.
The series is directed by Jan Maria Michelini and written by Francesco Arlanch, Mario Ruggeri, Luisa Cotta Ramosino and Lea Tafuri.