The Oscar-winning Austrian director Michael Haneke is working on a TV series, called “Kelvin’s Book,” the television company FremantleMedia announced on Monday.
The 10-part English-language show will be set in a dystopian future and tells the story of a group of young people whose plane is forced to make an emergency landing.
In a news statement, Mr. Haneke said, “After 10 TV-movies and 12 films, I wanted to tell a longer story for once.”
Mr. Haneke’s “Amour,” a French-language film about an aging couple, won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 2012 and the Palme d’Or, the highest accolade at the Cannes Film Festival, the same year. The acclaimed director had previously won the Palme d’Or for his movie “The White Ribbon” in 2009.
Mr. Haneke began his filmmaking career in television and made movies for TV in West Germany in the 1970s and ’80s, as well as a two-part mini-series, “Lemmings,” in 1979. In 1997 he adapted Franz Kafka’s “The Castle” for ORF, Austria’s public service broadcaster.
Mr. Haneke made his first feature film, “The Seventh Continent,” in 1989. Most of Mr. Haneke’s movies are in German and French, although he remade his 1997 German-language film “Funny Games” in English in 2007, and his latest movie, “Happy End,” though primarily in French, featured some dialogue in English.
The production company working on “Kelvin’s Book,” UFA Fiction, was also behind “Deutschland 83”, the German espionage series that aired in 2015.
“No other director of the present has sharpened and stirred up my perception through his films like Michael Haneke,” Nico Hoffman, the UFA Fiction chief executive, said in a statement. “ ‘Kelvin’s Book’ is an extraordinarily rich, gripping and ambitious story. With contemporary themes and a reflection of the digital age that we live in, there’s no better time for this project.”
No details were available about a broadcast partner or streaming platform for the series.