SVT, Arte GEIE board Urban Canyons’ Knights of the North: The Baltic Crusades

Knights of the North: The Baltic Crusades

Swedish pubcaster SVT and Arte GEIE in France and Germany have joined drama-led documentary Knights of the North: The Baltic Crusades as lead broadcasters.

The 1×90’/2×45’ doc comes from Manchester- and Malta-based history specialist Urban Canyons, and tells the fictitious but historically accurate story of a young Swedish knight who joins a German Crusader military order to convert the last pagan people of Europe.

Germany’s ZDF Studios is distributing the doc internationally. SBS in Australia, Rai in Italy, SRF in Switzerland, Česká Televise in the Czech Republic, Malta’s PBS, Estonia’s ERR, Go3 in the Baltic States and Latvia’s TV24 have pre-bought the programme.

Urban Canyons is the majority coproducer, with Tritone Studio in Latvia and Ulm Production in Estonia also coproducing and managing filming in their respective territories. Each coproducer has raised national funds, with Urban Canyons looking after overall production and delivery.

Sebastian Peiter, producer at Urban Canyons, said: “In these difficult times, especially with the lack of American and Asian copro partners, high-end specialist factual can only survive in collaboration with European state broadcasters and by sharing workflow and rights with fellow European producers who can bring additional state and broadcaster funding from their territory.

“This Malta/Latvia/Estonia coproduction is a first between three so-called low-capacity countries. Interestingly, the national history of each partner country is deeply entangled with the Christian military orders of the Medieval Crusades.”