Series Mania Hot List: 10 Standout International Shows at This Year’s Fest

Spain’s turbulent democratic transition gets a forensic, almost procedural treatment in Anatomy of a Moment, a historical drama built around the failed 1981 coup d’etat that nearly returned Spain’s neophyte democracy to Fascism.

Directed by Alberto Rodríguez and based on Javier Cercas’ bestselling account, the series features Money Heist star Álvaro Morte as Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, one of the main instigators of the coup. The Moviestar+ series is a powerful, and timely, reminder that democracy often hangs by a thread.

Sweden’s legal system becomes a battleground in Burden of Justice, a contemporary drama that blends courtroom tension with the moral unease of a Nordic thriller.

Set inside a elite Stockholm defense firm Matsson & Markovic — the kind of shop that represents drug barons and rich rapists — the series tracks a group of lawyers navigating a shifting legal landscape where new laws blur the line between justice and expediency.

Created by Snabba Cash and Top Dog writer Jens Lapidus, the show, being sold by DR Sales, avoids easy answers to remain in an grey world of ethical compromise.

Colombia’s Dear Killer Nannies, which is going out on Disney+ and Hulu and being sold by The Walt Disney Company, revisits the story of drug lord Pablo Escobar from the childhood perspective of his son, who was raised in privilege by a cadre of “nannies” who were actually his father’s hired killers.

Based on the memoirs of Juan Pablo Escobar, who co-created the show together with Sebastián Ortega, showrunner on Netflix hit El Marginal, the series reframes a familiar history of violence and crime through a more intimate, unsettling lens.

Australia’s Dustfall has the engine of a noir procedural. When a young woman is discovered naked and bloody in a cane field in Queensland with no memory of what happened to her, detective Tig Pollard (Anna Torv from The Last of Us and Mindhunter) is drawn in, and quickly finds something deeper and darker behind the crime, digging up buried trauma from her own past.

What sets this Australian thriller apart is its broader exploration of the long-lasting impact of sexual violence and exploitation, in all its forms. A co-production of Australia’s ABC, the BBC and Germany’s ZDF, Dustfall is being sold worldwide by Federation International.

Detectorists writer/director Mackenzie Crook finds the magical in the everyday in his new sort-of sitcom, a melancholic chuckler that is part workplace comedy, part existential exploration of grief and wonder.

Pearce Quigley plays Michael Sleep, a man disrupted. His girlfriend Clea disappeared 7 years ago, on Christmas Eve, and ever since then, Michael has been going through the motions, sleepwalking through his job at a hardware superstore — his main task seems to be winding up the customers with stories of “tartan paint” — and watching his garden grow wild around his silent house, hoping somehow that Clea will return.

When his eccentric and cognitively-confused father Brian (a superb Michael Palin) suggests an impossible, supernatural solution, Michael decides to take the leap, setting of a series of events both strange, wondrous and utterly unexpected. This gem of a show, produced by the BBC is being sold by Sphere Abacus worldwide.

Belgium’s The Best Immigrant imagines a near future where migration policy has devolved into spectacle. In an independent Flanders governed by a far-right regime, foreign-born residents face expulsion — unless they can win a reality competition offering residency as its prize. Imagine The Traitors meets Squid Game produced by ICE.

Created by Raoul Groothuizen and Cristina Poppe, the series’ dystopian future is uncomfortably plausible, and its focus on the personal stories, of migrants fighting for their lives, makes the stakes feel immediate and real. Premiering on Belgium’s Streamz platform, The Best Immigrant is being sold by Sony Pictures Television worldwide.

Germany’s The Flaws, from producer Razor Film and public broadcaster ZDF, takes workplace comedy into more surreal territory, following a group of underperforming civil servants who are accidentally propelled into a series of escalating misadventures. What starts as a satire of bureaucratic inertia quickly morphs into something more physical and absurd.

Director Arne Feldhusen, known for German cult-comedy hits Stromberg and Der Tatortreiniger, leans heavily on physical comedy and slapstick to create a Jacques Tati-style critique of modern work culture and institutional dysfunction.

John Butler’s crime comedy plays like a Ryanair version of The White Lotus.

We open on a pool in a package vacation rent-a-villa someone on Tenerife, where the body of a priest is floating, face down. Rewind to a week earlier when a pack of Paddies descend on the island for a destination wedding. Everyone, from the Molly-popping DJ to the apologetic priest flown in to officiate the ceremony (the one that will end up in the pool) has a dark secret.

A caustic social comedy that takes a cosy crime setting only to reveal a dark underbelly of deceit, hypocrisy and betrayal. The RTE series is being sold worldwide by Banijay Rights.

Spain’s Unfiltered is a kinder, gentler look at digital identity and adolescence, following three teenagers navigating the blurred lines between online personas and real-world selves. The series pays particular attention to Charlie, a trans boy at the start of his transition, who turns to digital tools to reshape his appearance — with consequences when those identities collide.

Amaya Izquierdo’s drama is remarkably measured and balanced in how it depicts Gen Z’s relation to digital spaces, presenting technology as both liberating and harmful. The result is a nuanced portrait of self-discovery and coming-of-age in an era where the search of authenticity is shaped by screens and online performance as much as IRL experience. Catalan streamer 3CAT produced the show and is handling worldwide sales.

Poland’s Variola Vera reconstructs the 1963 smallpox outbreak in Wrocław through a hybrid of medical drama and espionage thriller. As the city is sealed off to contain the virus, multiple perspectives converge: an intelligence officer returning from a classified mission, doctors battling the spread, and a journalist searching for answers.

Directed by Kuba Czekaj, the series distinguishes itself through its visual approach, that combines genres and formal experimentation, combining archival footage with dramatization and avantgarde arthouse techniques to transform a straightforward period piece into a more complicated reinterpretation of historical crisis through a contemporary lens. Produced and sold worldwide by Polish public broadcaster TVP.