We are glad to announce that the first two stages of the selection process for our Screenwriting Contest are now completed. Two large committees formed by professional readers and members of the DETECt project have carefully examined the 250 proposals that were submitted and the ten semi-finalists have been selected. Their projects will compete for the main prize award by our International Jury, as well as two special mentions awarded by a jury of DETECt members and a jury of students of Link Campus University (Rome).

Here are the names of the semi-finalists the titles of the proposed TV crime series and the loglines:

Harry Ayiotis

RED PLANET BLUES

A police detective on mankind’s first Mars colony is bored and tired of simply declaring clear suicides as being, well suicides. Imagine his excitement when an actual murder does take place on Mars… and his incompetence and lack of experience in trying to solve it.

Silvia M. Blakely and Andrea Gastaldon

LIKE A FAMILY

During a corporate company’ team building party in a posh villa in Venice, two women die. Vivienne, the company PR Manager, who also nearly died during the event, decides to find the killer.

Jaeger Carsten

SILVER GHOST

Two down-on-their-luck, small-time crooks engaged in vintage car scams find themselves in way over their heads when they come across a 1920s Rolls Royce Silver Ghost made of pure gold.

Stefanie Eisenschenk and Eveline Staehelin

DARK DATA. INVISIBLE POWER

Forensic profiler Leonie Riedle is investigating her first case-a money laundering scandal. She is not only caught between the fronts of dubious party interests and data giants in the EU election campaign, but also becomes the hunted. Who is manipulating whom here? Whom can she trust?

Samuel Jefferson

DISRUPTIVE

An ambitious young officer in Europol’s niche Disruptive Technologies department struggles to convince his old-school bosses that a new, highly organised and technologically savvy criminal organisation is at work from the shadows of Europe, and if they don’t do something soon, the organisation will grow to the point where it becomes unstoppable.

Francesco Meneghini, Leonora Sartori

WASTELAND

A group of diverse immigrants, working in slavery in modern-day, Southern Italy, are about to establish a new life and new society after killing their capturers.

Ivan Pavlović

HOTEL EUROPA

The Italian alpine town of Brunico is ready for the most anticipated event of its lifetime: to shoot the long-running soap opera Hotel Europa’s 30th and final season – when the protagonist unexpectedly disappears.

Ewa Stec

MAGERDO

Set in a Roma community in Southern Poland, “Magerdo” tells a dark story of a seventeen-year-old Roza, a gifted student and a bride-to-be, who breaks all the rules of her people and tricks Stefan, an unremarkable police detective, into the search for her long-lost mother, Anna.

Benedek Totth

SUN CITY

In Hungary, a nurse avenges the murder of her family in former Yugoslavia, putting herself in danger and evoking traumas from the past.

Jakob Ziemnicki

BALTIC NOIR

A priest has to face his murky past as he returns to his native Gdansk to unravel the mystery of his father’s death.

Five projects, to be announced on June 18, will be the finalists and be examined by the international Jury formed by Karen Hassen (Cattleya), Steve Matthews (HBO Europe), Giacomo Poletti (Mediaset), Eva van Leeuwen (Netflix) and the President of the Jury, the bestselling Italian crime fiction writer Maurizio De Giovanni.

The names of the winners will be announced during the closing event of the DETECt conference, to be held on June 23, at 5:30 PM, at Link Campus University in Rome as well as online. On this occasion, the members of the International Jury will give their feedback on the five projects that made it to the final stage, and the scholar and crime writer Alessandro Perissonotto will interview Maurizio De Giovanni.

The Semifinalists