Beta Film and Oscar-winning director Florian Gallenberger are continuing their partnership with WWII drama, The Turncoat. Described as being in the tradition of International Emmy winner Generation War, the limited series is based on the novel by Siegfried Lenz that centers on a young Wehrmacht soldier who is stranded in the no man’s land of the Polish forests, surrounded by partisans, questioning the meaning of duty, conscience, friendship and love. Jannis Niewöhner (Maximilian And Marie De Bourgogne) stars alongside Malgorzata Mikolajczak, Sebastian Urzendowsky (The Counterfeiters), Rainer Bock (Never Look Away) and Ulrich Tukur (The Lives Of Others). Gallenberger (John Rabe, Oscar-winning short Quiero Ser) is helming from a script by Bernd Lange (The Vanishing). Shooting is underway in Poland and Germany on the Dreamtool production for public broadcaster NDR, ARD Degeto and SWR. Beta Film handles world sales and will present first images at MIPCOM in Cannes this fall.

Animated film specialist GKids has acquired North American distribution rights to Japanese feature Promare and will release it theatrically in both Japanese and a new English language version in 2019. The pic marks the first feature from Studio TRIGGER, founded by former studio Gainax animator and director Hiroyuki Imaishi, whose credits include TV series Gurren Lagann and Kill La Kill. The film’s rights are being sold worldwide by Toho and the all-rights deal for North America was negotiated by GKids’ CEO and founder Eric Beckman and Akihiro Takeda for Toho. Pic follows a futuristic firefighting mecha service created to protect the world.