Serielizados bets on local production with the first Catalan series incubator

The catalog of series has grown exponentially with the arrival of streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO, Movistar+, or Filmin. Among so many superhero stories, Turkish novels, Latin American soap operas, or Korean dramas, the different languages that coexist in Spain do not manage to find their place in audiovisual production. The main reason is the lack of budget to compete against the big giants.

While companies have seen Spain as an attractive market to produce all kinds of fictions in Castilian, they do not, for the moment, view with such good eyes the commitment to Catalan, Galician, or Basque. To highlight the country's linguistic richness, the digital magazine Serielizados has launched the first incubator for series in Catalan, with the aim of boosting local audiovisual talent through the financing of new productions. 

The Serielizados Kick incubator will select a total of eight projects in its first edition. They will have to consist of six episodes with a duration of less than 20 minutes. Víctor Sala, co-founder of Serielizados, defines quality and innovation as fundamental lines, with a well-constructed story arc and characters. And he warns: "We don't want a feature film chopped into twenty-minute episodes. The concept of seriality must be kept in mind."

"We don't want a feature film chopped into twenty-minute episodes. The concept of seriality must be kept in mind," says Víctor Sala, co-founder of Serielizados

The call for Serielizados Kick is open until August 22 and any legal resident in Spain can participate. The selected projects will be announced during the second half of September.

The launch of the incubator has been possible thanks to funding from the Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA), an agency attached to the Ministry of Culture. Likewise, the initiative has received supervision from the Guinonistes Associats de Catalunya (GAC) association and support from the SGAE Foundation. It also has the collaboration of the Ramon Lull University (URL).

It all started with a final degree project

Serielizados was born in 2013 as a final degree project at URL, by Víctor Sala and Betu Martínez. At that time, it was just a digital magazine that wanted to vindicate television series as a genre of their own and give them the space they deserved in the cultural landscape. A position they would end up earning with flying colors but which at that time no one believed, considering that, as Sala points out, "it was a time when comparisons with cinema were odious and the film industry looked down on series."

The project that started as a university endeavor quickly armed itself with a new tool, the Serielizados Fest, a festival that was designed to bring together not only its readers but also creators, production companies and academics, as well as continue to position its object of devotion. The first edition was held in Barcelona in 2014. That first time was followed by eight more in the Catalan capital, four in Madrid and one in Ibiza this year, with the purpose of it being the first of many visits. The creators of hits such as Rick and Morty, The Wire, Gomorra, The Young Pope or El ministerio del Tiempo have been some of the speakers who have passed through the festival.