Series Mania & Beta launch third Seriesmakers scheme, offering $54,000 prize

Seriesmakers 2024 winners

French festival Series Mania and Germany’s Beta Group have launched the third edition of creative initiative Seriesmakers, offering a €50,000 ($54,000) prize for the winner.

The scheme is targeted at feature film directors who venture into the world of series and looks to support talents working on new scripted shows to develop a complete pitch deck, guided by directors, showrunners, writers and producers.

For the third edition, there will be one main award of €50,000, with the program open to filmmakers who have at least one commercially released feature film and/or have been selected for an official film festival.

As before, the eligible directors can submit in teams of either director-producer or director-writer.

The initiative sees ten teams selected to participate in a tailor-made training program, with the winning team announced during the 2025 Series Mania Forum in Lille, France. They will develop a pilot script and a bible for the awarded project with further creative support from Beta’s Content Division.

Deadline for submissions is 20 June. Seriesmakers is led by Series Mania’s director Laurence Herszberg and supported by Beta Group, in collaboration with HFF München (University of Television and Film Munich).

Herszberg said: “Our past two editions of Seriesmakers have shown that there is indeed a real demand from the film industry to move into the world of television series as evidenced by our impressive winners for 2023 including Juho Kuosmanen and César Díaz, with Erik Matti, Kevin MacDonald and Barbara Albert winning for 2024.

“This past year we had submissions from several new countries and expect even more new countries for 2025. I can’t wait to start seeing the new projects.”