Belgian Series ‘The Best Immigrant’ Wins Best Thriller Idea In Streamz Academy Competition
Congratulations are in order for the upcoming Caviar-produced series ‘The Best Immigrant’, which was recently crowned the winner of the Streamz Academy ‘Best Thriller Idea’ competition at the Oostende Film Festival earlier today.
The series, created by Belgian writing duo Cristina Poppe and Raoul Groothuizen, was chosen out of 534 pitches and eight finalists, who all had to undergo an intensive development process to craft their ideas hosted by leading coaches, producers, and TV experts in Flemish Television.
The pair won the hearts of the judges, Streamz and the audience with their powerful original story of a young immigrant couple who must fight for residency from an extremist Belgian government. As part of their project trailer, which was directed by renowned filmmaker Adil El Arbi (Rebel, Bad Boys For Life), the trailer also featured a star-studded cast including Aaronb Blommaert, Saïd Boumazoughe, Ikram Aoulad, Charlotte Timmers, Lauren Debie and more. As winners, Christina and Raoul will get the coveted opportunity to commission The Best Immigrant as a full-length mini-series.
Speaking on their success, the winning team noted, “We are very happy that the jury and the public have given us the confidence to develop this idea into a series. It felt like our last chance to release this. We believe very strongly in this idea and are grateful to Caviar for supporting us in this process”.
Caviar producer Dimitri Verbeeck also noted that Caviar was overjoyed to support the duo and their idea, having quickly fallen in love with the series due to its exciting and burning themes, and saw the series as an opportunity to bring humanity to an extremely polarizing topic through fiction- “We fell for the concept of ‘The Best Immigrant’ because we see it as a very exciting thriller with a burning current theme. Just like the rest of the world, we are confronted with extreme polarization about migration every day. Instead of looking away from this, we want to address this in a fictional genre story.”
The Best Immigrant is set to be commissioned as a 4-part 30-minute series on Streamz. Check out the trailer for the winning series below, which is currently due to be broadcast in 2025.