London TV Screenings 2023: Keshet International to launch new factual content

Global producer and distributor Keshet International has acquired a raft of factual content to launch to buyers at the London TV Screenings, alongside the first drama from Keshet Broadcasting’s 100M NIS slate (as previously announced on November 29, 2022).

“The Sales team and I are thrilled to unveil this high-quality slate of newly acquired content to our clients attending the London TV Screenings. This year we are all coming together in person not to only launch our new slate of Keshet dramas, led by the excellent and heart-breaking ‘A Body that Works,’ but to also participate in what is quickly becoming a very important gathering for international distributors like us,”  said Kelly Wright, Keshet International’s new Managing Director of Distribution.

In a multi-title deal with MRP Matila Röhr Productions that includes four feature-length documentaries, more than 70 shorts, and two “making of” documentaries, Keshet International has picked up their latest feature “Tale of the Sleeping Giants” (Tunturin Tarina), which recently opened in Finnish cinemas to critical acclaim and strong ticket sales, having taken three years to film in the arctic wilderness of Lapland. This package also includes the two earlier features in MRP’s trilogy of natural history features: “Tale of a Forest” (2013) and “Tale of a Lake” (2016), the biggest box office documentary in the history of Finnish cinema, and “Nature Symphony” (2019).

“We are in the process of expanding our catalog, so I am thrilled to be partnering with MRP on our first acquisitions deal for natural history content. We are looking forward to working with them to leverage their incredible archive of footage to produce new titles for a growing market of buyers of blue-chip natural history content,”  commented Anke Stoll, SVP of Acquisitions and Co-productions at Keshet International.

The company has also acquired the tape and format rights to “Undercover: Sexual Harassment – The Truth,” Kalel Productions’ current affairs documentary for Channel 4. Investigative journalist and broadcaster Ellie Flynn carries out hidden-camera experiments to expose the sexual harassment of women in the real world and online, from nude pictures to being flashed, groped, spiked, and raped. In one experiment where Ellie pretends to be drunk on a night out, a man follows her all the way back to her hotel room, where she reveals she is sober and confronts him.

Keshet International’s scripted slate at London TV Screenings is headlined by Kuma Studios’ “A Body that Works” (Goof Shlishi), which will receive an exclusive buyers’ screening ahead of its international premiere at Series Mania 2023. The eight-part relationship drama has an intense triangle at its heart – one involving love, jealousy, desire, and selflessness – that sees a childless couple enlist the help of a surrogate.