Prime Video Greenlights German Original Series With Comedy Actors Anke Engelke and Bastian Pastewka
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Comedy actors Anke Engelke and Bastian Pastewka will star in a new German original series for Amazon Prime Video to be produced by Bildundtonfabrik.
The series is due to appear on the platform next year. Further details on the show have yet to be announced.
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“Anke Engelke and Bastian Pastewka are a real dream team in front of the camera. Viewers can look forward to their first series project together on Prime Video,” said Philip Pratt, head of German originals for Prime Video.
News of the show was revealed by Pratt on Tuesday at a panel during the Berlin Film Festival about Prime Video’s international content strategy. Other speakers included head of Nordic Originals, Karin Lindström, and head of Nigerian Originals, Amazon Studios and Prime Video, Wangi Mba-Uzoukwu.
Amazon’s German shows have included thrillers such as the Matthias Schweighöfer starrer “You Are Wanted” and “Beat,” with Jannis Niewöhner, teen drama “We Children from Bahnhof Zoo” and “German Crime Story: Deadlock.”
Forthcoming Prime Video shows include fantasy title “The Gryphon,” about a fantastic world called The Black Tower, where a monster called the Gryphon mercilessly subjugates all living creatures, crime/drama “The Pimp: No Fucking Fairytale,” about the rise of a pimp gang on the Reeperbahn in the 1980s, and psychological thriller “The Therapy,” about the disappearance of the daughter of a well-known psychiatrist.
One of Germany’s most popular comedians and entertainers, Engelke also appears in Amazon’s ongoing comedy gameshow “LOL: Last One Laughing,” based on the hit Japanese show “Hitoshi Matsumoto Presents Documental.”
Engelke, whose career spans decades, appeared with Pastewka in the Sat.1 comedy sketch show “Die Wochenshow” in the 1990s, and later toplined another long-running Sat.1 comedy show, “Ladykracher.” She is also a familiar face to festgoers in Berlin: During the Dieter Kosslick years as festival director she hosted the Berlinale’s opening and closing ceremonies.
Pastewka has appeared in countless TV and film productions, including the hit 2004 comedy “Der Wixxer” and his most successful show, the long-running comedy series “Pastewka,” in which he plays a fictional version of himself. The series was inspired by Larry David’s U.S. show “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” It ran on Sat.1 from 2005 to 2014 and was later revived by Amazon in 2018.
Based in Cologne and Berlin, Bildundtonfabrik is an independent production company whose credits include a number of Netflix titles, including the finance-sector drama “King of Stonks”; “How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast),” its feature film spin-off “Buba,” and “Shiny_Flakes: The Teenage Drug Lord,” a documentary about the real-life criminal case that inspired the series; the forthcoming Paramount Plus documentary “Fool Me,” about imposters and deception; and ZDF’s World Cup soccer documentary “Qatar Declassified — How a Country Bought Football.”
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