Works of Arte

Navigating a sea of heavyweight streamers and fierce competition for eyeballs, FrancoGerman cultural public broadcaster Arte’s scripted strategy is successfully exploiting a distinct gap in the market.

Arte France’s director of fiction, Olivier Wotling, doesn’t believe the global glut of scripted content is delivering variety and diversity of choice. And it’s precisely where Arte’s own drama strategy sets itself apart, he argues.

“Our impression is that the spectrum of choice and proposals is shrinking as far as TV shows are concerned. There are more and more cop shows and thrillers and our feeling is Arte’s role in bringing original and new takes to its programmes is just as interesting as it was two or three years ago,” says Wotling. “Our mission is to keep a distinctive, even peculiar voice in a world with more and more platforms and streamers, and maybe channels, but where the diversity of programmes isn’t growing.

“Unlike others, we’re not looking for genres or subject-driven issues. Especially with public broadcasters, it’s often the case that they need a show about, for instance, today’s youth, or a show about the ill-treatment of kids today. We don’t work like that at all.”

Viewers won’t find the usual cop drama on Arte and it will only consider thrillers if there’s a new take on the genre, says Wotling. “We start with a writer and a point of view. It’s the light that is cast on the issue that makes the project interesting or not, and not the subject itself.”

While its heartland remains contemporary drama

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infused with social issues, Wotling says Arte has recently been looking for a more positive spirit and human warmth in its shows.

Its remake of Israeli scripted format In Treatment (En Therapie) a couple of years ago was the turning point in that strategy. “We think there is de opportunity to grab the audience, not only through mysteries, thrillers and dark stories but also through feel-good stories that are positive, very human and very warm,” says Wotling.

Italian stories, which Arte boards as a minority coproducer, is a bonus, says Wotling.

Last year Arte launched Black Butterflies (Les Papillions Noirs), a thriller about a serial-killer couple which is now showing on Netflix. On Arte, the series attracted 3.3 million digital views and an average of 827,000 viewers and a 4.6% share on linear. “It was a real success, but that’s not a reason to try to look only for more thrillers. We’re staying cool-headed. While the success is wonderful, we have to go elsewhere and not repeat ourselves,” says Wotling.

Arte’s mission to keep offering fresh, new

Across its digital and linear feed combined, Arte airs a mix of homegrown original titles, coproductions and acquisitions, releasing a new title every fortnight.

Wotling’s department generates three or four French fiction series per year on average –each typically of six to eight episodes – out of a development slate of between 10 and 12 projects at any given time. In addition, it partners on three or four international coproductions as a minority coproducer.

Offering Arte’s viewers European content comprising UK, Norwegian, Spanish or definitely an nly lso human and combined, ginal titles, g a new title or four rage –– out 0 and ition, onal ent or stories isn’t a risk, he argues. Rather, Arte has “been able to go for shows we knew probably wouldn’t match our audience tastes or expectations but that we felt had to be done, such as Le Monde de Demain [Reign Supreme],” he says.

A copro between Arte France and Les Films du Bélier in association with Netflix, the series is set in the late 70s and early 80s and centres on France’s first hip-hop band, NTM.

The 2022 French audiovisual reforms changed the way the country’s public broadcasters, including Arte, are funded, moving away from a licence fee and towards direct government funding through taxation.

Under this shake-up, Wotling says his budget remains stable. The big change, he says, is that “the digital platform is more important than the channel.” is Italian true crime drama Esterno Notte (Exterior Night) from Marco Bellocchio, about the kidnapping and killing of statesman Aldo Moro by terror group The Red Brigade in 1978, where it “wouldn’t make any sense” to have given the series a French angle.

Wotling says fiction series are an important driver in attracting viewers to Arte’s digital platform. “Right now we are in development with or even shooting projects that two years or three years ago we wouldn’t have done if we’d been thinking only of the [linear] channel,” he says.

Currently shooting is Machine, a six-part 30-minute format best suited to a digital platform. “We’re going with [shorter formats] now because the platform is definitely leading,” Wotling says.

Machine, which centres on an anonymous woman skilled in martial arts, taps into the current “air of rebellion” present in France, and “a growing feeling of anger – it’s not revolution but people are [anticipating] a fight, and I’m sure this show will strike a chord with the French,” says Wotling. Amazon’s Prime Video is onboard as a pre-buyer for a second window in France.

At the other end of the spectrum are Frenchoriginated projects Arte is keen to get international foreign partners involved in at an early stage. “We are happy to share development and writing, and we believe we are stronger when there are more of us,” says Wotling. “We learn from working with other European countries, writers and producers, and French fiction can only be enriched by [such partnerships].”

A prime example is Arte’s hit French-Israeli copro No Man’s Land, about the Syrian-Kurdish-ISIS war, which has just finished shooting a second season. The Arte and Hulu copro is produced by Haut et Court TV, Masha and Spiro Films in coproduction with Fremantle.

Another is upcoming series Rematch from Unité, along with Federation, which dramatises the duel between chess champion Garry Kasparov and the IBM super computer Deep Blue. The series, set in New York and filmed in English and Russian, is currently at the edit stage and is expected to launch in 2024.

Arte unveiled five new French-led projects at Series Mania in March, including Franco-Belgian series De Grâce (Haven of Grace, 6x52’), political satire Sous Contrôle (Under Control, 6x30’), serial killer comedy murder mystery Polar Park (6x50’) and The Girl Who Learned To Kneel (working title, 6x52’). The latter comes from Israeli writer Hagai Levi, who wrote the original Israeli version of In Treatment

In autumn 2020, Arte launched an additional tier of acquired digital-only scripted offerings. The latest selection includes UK comedy-drama Pure, Lebanese drama Awake, Russian series An Ordinary Woman, Croatian show The Last Socialist Artefact and Stephen Frears’ State of the Union, written by British novelist Nick Hornby.

Meanwhile, launching across linear and digital in May is UK drama Black Earth Rising, a BBC-Netflix copro from Hugo Blick exploring international war crimes. Wotling says he would have liked Arte to be a coproducer on the series to secure an exclusive first-window for France. “That’s exactly the kind of mixture we love, with a very intimate, dramatic story, a family story and a really important and tragic page of history.” p

While conceding the challenge of being a niche player with a small commissioning slate, Wotling argues that, with the narrowing of scripted choices globally, Arte can “show people, other broadcasters and our partners that you can do really original things or take risks.” It means thinking about a project in terms of its spirit, such as being warm, witty or positive, rather than in genres, he says.

Arte regularly partners with global streamers who typically join as pre-buyers without seeking editorial or artistic input. “They’re happy with it because Arte offers something edgy for a niche in their wide spectrum of offering. We’re like a research and development lab to buy shows they’re thinking of making from,” says Wotling.

When it comes to coproducing with or pre-buying from Arte, Wotling says projects and partnerships can come from anywhere. “For us, it goes in both directions – from foreign countries to France and with us as minor coproduction partners but still intending to play a role in the writing and development process,” he says.

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For Wotling, the challenge is less about increasing scripted output and more about offering a curated service that gives viewers something special they can’t see elsewhere, and securing longer rights to the shows it does have in the free VoD landscape, where competition is heating up.

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“We launch one new show every second week and we have about 200 to 300 hours of shows on the platform,” he says. “We’ll never be Netflix but we don’t think it’s about bringing more content, because we have a critical mass and enough new launches on a regular basis to attract people.

“What’s new is that people now come to the platform, not only to catch up with a programme they missed on the channel, but to check what’s new on the platform. For us, that’s perfect.”

As the streaming market heats up on the African continent, Amazon Studios and Prime Video’s head of Nigerian originals, Wangi Mba-Uzoukwu, is keen to find “hyper-local” stories and voices across scripted, unscripted and movies to differentiate Amazon Prime Video in the territory and diaspora.

The veteran audiovisual exec and her team are currently building a slate of local originals for the streamer’s Nigerian service, which launched last August.

Taking the experience of more established Prime Video markets such as Germany, the Nigerian service is after “a really hyper-local way of seeing the market” rather than a “onesize-fits-all” approach, Mba-Uzoukwu told the European Film Market Berlinale in February.

Although Mba-Uzoukwu and her team are still developing a slate of shows, Amazon is aiming for Prime Video in Nigeria to be different to other local services because of its focus. It is keen to “skew towards different genres we feel appeal to the customers in our market,” she said when discussing the service’s content priorities.

“We want to be able to appeal to and get many people to come in to see all the various things we have, including all the international content, and the way to do that is to do content that actually brings everybody in,” she said.

This is likely to veer towards “genres that are a bit more comedy and action, as well as mainstream drama, because in Nigeria that’s what people already have,” Mba-Uzoukwu said. “At the same time, we push boundaries with some new genres that they may not know they wanted but they’ve not experienced it for various reasons.”

-Uzoukwu said. “At e nres ted arious reasons.” exec has identified or , are st tell those stories. o

In particular, the exec has identi a gap in Nigeria for “light, optimistic stories about hope, about the future, about what can be. We’re in a place in Africa where there are all these dark stories, and we must tell those stories. But we also have to remember what it is that entertains us, what makes us feel good about ourselves, and I think we’re missing that.”