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The South African crime thriller Reyka is based on the story of a real-life serial killer, Thozamile Taki. The killer was responsible for the deaths of 13 young women in a sugarcane field in South Africa. The series also explores several complexities of the mind, including the Oedipus complex, pedophilia, and Stockholm syndrome. Director Rohan Dickson has explored the complexities of the human mind in the series to ensure that greater depth is added to the narrative. The plot revolves around the life of Reyka, a girl who was abducted at the age of 12, and the way she struggles to battle her inner demons all her life. Will Reyka be able to save her daughter Thuli from the clutches of Speelman? Will the serial killer eventually be found? Let’s find the answers to these questions!

Spoilers Ahead

What Was Reyka’s Relationship With Angus Speelman?

Reyka had been abducted at...

Season 2 of Reyka, the South African crime thriller starring Kim Engelbrecht (The Flash, Dominion) in the title role, will stream for U.S. audiences beginning Thursday, Jan. 4, 2024, on BritBox.

Reyka Season 1 (currently available on BritBox) followed the flawed but brilliant criminal profiler, Dr. Reyka Gama, as she investigated a string of brutal murders committed by a serial killer in the sugar cane fields of KwaZulu-Natal.

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South Africa’s Quizzical Pictures has commissioned eight-part crime series “Murder By The Sea.”

The series is set in Blaasgat, a fictional coastal town named after its giant blowhole. When Lennart Cato, a local man-made-good, is found dead inside a papier-mâché whale on the opening night of a new Whale Museum that he’s funding, the locals turn to town resident and retired old-school thespian Lawrence Mantooth for answers. Once famous for his 80s TV show, where he played detective Pericles van Breda, Lawrence has found that few locals see the line between actor and character and often call on him to help with their little mysteries. Now, with this crime on their doorstep, he’s viewed as the obvious person to find out whodunnit? However, the real detective in Blaasgat is the woman behind the man – Lawrence’s keenly observant wife, Dawn Mantooth-Solomon.

“Murder By The Sea” is currently...

Agatha Christie, the “Queen of Crime”, whose novels are still adapted for the screen with machine-like regularity, knew that the question in the title of her 1934 mystery Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? was too good to pass up. “You don’t know yet who Evans is going to be... Evans will come in due course,” she once wrote. “The title is fixed.” Well, after a century of intriguing readers, that central proposition is now being brought to television viewers in the form of a three-part Britbox series, starring, written and directed by Hugh Laurie.

Narnia’s Will Poulter steps into the Christieverse as Bobby Jones, a happy-go-lucky vicar’s son who finds a dying man during a round of golf. “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” the man splutters with his final breath and Bobby is thrust on the trail of murderers, kidnappers and dope fiends. He’s ably...

Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer is leading a thriller for South African network M-Net.

Filming will commence next month on White Lies, which will star Dormer alongside Brendon Daniels (Four Corners) as investigative journalist Edie Hansen and detective Forty Bell respectively. Set in the wealthy neighbourhood of Bishopscourt, Cape Town, Hansen gets caught up in the ugly underbelly that lies beneath the picturesque beauty of the city, dragging her back to a turbulent past. Following her estranged brother’s murder in his luxury home, her world plunges deeper into chaos when her brother’s teenage children become prime suspects for the crime, as she finds herself at loggerheads with Bell.

Having previously combined on International Emmy Award-nominated M-Net drama Reyka, South African indie Quizzical Pictures is producing with Fremantle.

Dormer is a great get. She is best known for her role as Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones and...

Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games star Natalie Dormer is set to lead the cast of White Lies, a South African crime thriller from M-Net, Quizzical Pictures and Fremantle.

The Hollywood Reporter can reveal that the British actress — who became a fan favorite for playing Margaery Tyrell across 26 episodes of Game of Thrones — is now in Cape Town, where shooting is due to start on March 6. Dormer also had major roles in Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Tudors, and moved into producing and writer with 2018 thriller In Darkness.

Joining Dormer is award-winning South African actor Brendon Daniels, whose credits include the acclaimed film Four Corners, Skemerdans and Trackers, another M-Net international co-production.

Created by Sean Steinberg and written by award-winning scriptwriter Darrel Bristow-Bovey, White Lies is described as an “urgent exploration of race and privilege, inequality and identity.”

Set in the wealthy neighbourhood of Bishopscourt, Cape Town, the...

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The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has announced its nominees for the 2022 International Emmy Awards, which will be presented Nov. 21 in New York City.

In the drama series competition, there are nominations for Netflix and Gaumont Television’s French mystery thriller Lupin and the American-Mexican crime series Narcos: Mexico, as they contend against nominees Reyka, a crime drama from M-Net and Fremantle, and World Productions’ Vigil series from the U.K.

And the comedy category will see Netflix and Eleven Film’s Sex Education out of the U.K., and HBO Latin America’s Bunker from Mexico contend against UK-based Big Deal Films’ Dreaming Whilst Black and the Canal+ original On The Verge series.

In the performance categories, the best actor nominations go to Sverrir Gudnason for A Royal Secret, Scoot McNairy for Narcos: Mexico, Irving Welsh’s Crime‘s Dougray Scott...

“Sex Education,” Jodie Comer limiter series “Help” and “Lupin” are among the shows nominated for an International Emmy Award.

23 countries are represented across 15 categories and 60 nominees. The International Emmys will take place on Nov. 21 in New York.

“When you look at the geographic spread, diversity and quality of our Nominees, it becomes obvious that great television knows no borders and is emerging around the world,” said International Academy president and CEO Bruce Paisner. “We look forward to recognizing these outstanding programs and performances on our global stage with the International Emmy.”

Check out the full list of nominations below:

Arts Programming

“Bios: Calamaro”

Buena Vista Original Productions (Disney) / Nat Geo

Argentina

“Charlie Chaplin, Le Génie De La Liberté” [“Charlie Chaplin, The Genius Of Liberty”]

France Télévisions / Kuiv Productions

France

“Freddie Mercury: The Final Act”

Rogan Productions

United Kingdom

“Wonderful World: A New York Jazz Story”

Nhk

Japan

Best Performance by an Actor

Sverrir Gudnason in “En...

To mark the release of The Cane Field Killings on 30th May, we’ve been given a copy to give away on DVD.

Brilliant but broken criminal profiler, Reyka Gama (Kim Engelbrecht) returns to her beautiful hometown of KwaZulu-Natal to track down and bring to justice a rampant serial killer who has been violently murdering women, discarding their dead and burnt bodies in the sugarcanes, to be lost forever.

But it soon becomes clear that Reyka’s reasons for returning to her homeland are far more complex than they first appeared, and she finds herself drawn back to the source of a nightmarish childhood trauma that continues to haunt her… a man named Angus Speelman (Iain Glen).

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only

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The Small Print

Open to UK residents only The competition will close 20th June 2022 at 23.59 GMT The winner will be...

Dorothy Ghettuba remembers the moment that changed her life. The Kenya-born entrepreneur was traveling with friends in Zambia when their driver fell asleep at the wheel, sending their van careening off the road and into a tree. The group left the accident unscathed, but the brush with death rattled Ghettuba. “Things can happen to you that make you pause,” she tells Variety. “And that was a thing that made me pause and say to myself, ‘If today was my last day, have I lived my best life?’”

Ghettuba had been working at a venture capital firm in Canada, but she left her job and returned to Kenya, where she began to chase a lifelong dream to join the entertainment industry and tell the kinds of stories that spoke to her. Within a few years she’d produced her first pilot for public broadcaster Kbc and was soon developing a slate...

Global Networks Swoop For Fremantle South Africa Drama ‘Reyka’

Fremantle’s debut South African drama Reyka has sold to UK’s Channel 4, Canada’s CBC, Canal+ in Europe and HBO LatAm. The news comes as BritBox North America prepares to launch the show, which comes from South African network M-Net and Fremantle with Harriet Gavshon for Quizzical and Serena Cullen for Serena Cullen Productions. The drama follows a flawed but brilliant criminal profiler, Reyka Gama who, haunted by her past, investigates a string of brutal murders committed by a serial killer in the sugar cane fields of KwaZulu-Natal.

Alesha Dixon, Craig David, Maya Jame Join ‘Walk The Line’ Panel

British stars Alesha Dixon, Craig David and Maya Jama are to join Gary Barlow on the judging panel of Simon Cowell’s ITV format Walk The Line. The news comes soon after Cowell revealed he...

Around the time she was in the seventh grade, South African actor Thando Thabethe auditioned for the lead role in a school play. It didn’t pan out the way she’d planned — she landed a small part in the choir, “sort of singing ‘Kumbaya’ and not really doing much,” she recalls, with a laugh — but a spark was lit. “Even just being part of something that small at such a young age is what shaped me, knowing that this is something that I want to do for the rest of my life.”

That life-long dream now has Thabethe poised for breakout success. First comes a star turn as Constable Nandi Cele in the crime drama “Reyka,” an eight-part series produced by Serena Cullen Prods. and Quizzical Pictures for the South African pay-tv channel M-Net that Fremantle is distributing globally. That will be followed by a lead role in “Blood Psalms,...

With the majority of big global TV distributors opting out of a physical presence at Mipcom, the flashy stands have been replaced by snazzy digital platforms showcasing content rolling out starting this fall.

Among them are a series of virtual festivals by Banijay, which acquired Endemol Shine in summer 2020 and boasts a catalog of more than 88,000 hours of programming. Rather than join Mipcom organizer Reed Midem’s virtual Mipcom Online Plus event, the mega-indie is going its own way, as are so many other distributors.

The latest of its planned digital forays is a non-English language scripted festival designed to showcase the group’s eclectic mix of European dramas. These include six-part French show “Germinal,” a modern adaptation of Émile Zola’s classic 1985 coal-mining strike saga; Swedish boarding-school drama “A Class Apart”; and Italian coming-of-age series “My Ballerina,” a co-production with Italy’s Mediaset.

“We have a vast array of...