Series Mania Winner ‘Blackport’ Adds Nordisk Film & TV Fond Prize

variety.com:

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentIcelandic smash hit drama series “Blackport” won on Wednesday the 2022 Nordisk Film & TV Prize, Scandinavia’s top plaudit for drama series writing.The award was announced on site at the end of an intense first day of conference panels at the Göteborg Festival’s TV Drama Vision, with two of the series’ three writers, Gísli Örn Garðarsson and Mikael Torfason on stage to collect the Nordic TV Drama Screenplay Award, carrying a €20,000 ($22,600) cash prize.

They were accompanied by producer Nina Dögg Filippusdóttir. The prize also went to fellow screenwriter Björn Hlynur Haraldsson.Clinching the NFTF Prize, “Blackport” has scored a remarkable triple, winning the Series Mania Award at the Berlinale Series Market’s 2018 Co-Pro Series competition after an inspired on-stage pitch by Garðarsson and going on to take the top prize at Series Mania last September. “Blackport” fought off stiff competition from Oscar-nominated Danish director Lone Sherfig’s “The Shift,” Canneseries’ Norwegian 2021 ensemble cast winner “Countrymen,” penned by Izer Aliu and Anne Bjørnstad, and Auli Mantila’s original Finnish food fraud thriller “Transport” and Tove Eriksen Hillblom’s “Suburbia,” a resonant put-down of Swedish middle-class consumerist hell.Directed by Garðarsson, Haraldsson and María Reyndal and sold by France’s About Premium Content, “Blackport” weighs in as a family saga sluiced by period tragic farce taking a deep-dive into Iceland over 1983-91.It kicks off in 1983 as fishing quotas are introduced into Iceland.

Harpa, a village council secretary, builds a local fishing empire in a stunning western fjord but at an ever larger humancost as the decade plays out.