Written by Kianna Best on May 19, 2025. Posted in Awards and Festivals

The Italian Global Series Festival launches inaugural programme and the Maximo awards

A new Italian TV festival celebrating local and international series launches this summer featuring Netflix premieres, a Steven Moffat and Beryl Vertue masterclass and a competition jury leaded by two-time Palme d’Or winning Danish filmmaker Bille August.

 

 

The Italian Global Series Festival (IGSF), which takes place in Riccione and Rimini in northern Italy from June 21 to 28, is actually a revived and updated edition of the Roma Fiction Festival which ended in 2016.

 

Artistic director Marco Spagnoli said the festival has a dual mission: “to promote Italian production in a very diversified international context” and “to recognise the talents and excellences of our country, with particular attention to the protection of the current star system and the commitment to building the future one.

 

Along with August, director and screenwriter Cristina Comencini (Don’t Tell, When the Night) and director/writer Paolo Genovese (Perfect Strangers) will judge Italian and international series screened across Drama, Comedy, Limited Series and TV Movies. These titles will all be eligible for Best Series, Best Leading Actor and Actress, and Best Creator and/or Director at the new Maximo Awards. A special Italian Fiction award will also be given to a local show distributed in Italy in the year to May 31, 2025. The National Union of Film Journalists will award a Special Nastro D’argento to a major international co-production present at the festival.

 

The first recipients of the festival’s Maximo Excellence Awards include Evangeline Lilly who played Kate Austen in the ABC drama series Lost, the Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh and Godmother’s Elena Sofia Ricci. Italian electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder will also be celebrated.

 

British script writer and actor Mark Gatiss (Bookish; Mission Impossible) and his sometime colleague showrunner Steven Moffat (Doctor Who - episodes of which Gatiss wrote; and Sherlock in which Gatiss played Mycroft) will give separate masterclasses. There will be first look screenings of two Netflix shows; the first episodes of Squid Game 3 and of Too Much, the new series from Lena Dunham.

 

Other premieres include European co-production Rise of the Raven; Noi Del Rione Sanità from Italy, Spanish language drama Los Sin Nombre and Who Almost Killed Melody? from Canada.

 

President of the David di Donatello Awards Piera Detassis and the President of the National Union of Film Journalists Laura Delli Colli will moderate conversations with talent.

 

Spagnolia added, “I am grateful to the Ministry of Culture and the Audiovisual Producers Association for the honor of being able to return to work, this time in person, on the ‘reincarnation’ of the Roma Fiction Fest.

 

“IGSF aims to become a point of reference and a meeting place for the national and international industry, in the name of the stories, talent and audiovisual productions that have always represented Italian excellence.”

 

A special section, 'Extraordinary – Women Portrayed In Series’ is curated by the Director of the Turin Cinema Museum, Carlo Chatrian, and will explore how female representation in TV has evolved.

 

The IGSF is conceived and organised by APA, the Association of Audiovisual Producers, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, SIAE and AGIS; it is free and accessible to the general public, utilising Riccione’s Pala Riccione, Multiplex Cine Palace, Ceccarini Square, Roma Square and Rimini’s Cinema Fulgor, Teatro Galli and Corte degli Agostiniani, throughout the last week of June 2025.