“Tokyo Crush,” a pioneering France-Japan comedy romance, gained the Sequence Mania Discussion board Finest Venture Award, awarded for greatest title on the French TV pageant’s vastly common Co-Professional Pitching Periods.

Certainly one of Sequence Mania’s business centerpieces, the Pitching Periods noticed 15 initiatives offered to an business viewers on Tuesday at Sequence Mania in Lille, northern France. 

Carrying a €50,000 ($54,000) money prize, the award was introduced by Laurence Herszberg, Sequence Mania founder and normal director, and the Co-Professional Pitching Periods jury president, M.Okay. Kennedy, Studiocanal government managing director of TV Sequence.

Written by Clémence Dargent and produced by Jonas Ben Haiem and Jean-Félix Dealberto for France’s Salle Commune and Japan’s Hiroko Oda for Flag Inc., “Tokyo Crush” activates Mona, a wildly inventive Parisian sous-chef, who thinks she’s hit the jackpot when she’s employed to show a struggling Tokyo izakaya into town’s subsequent scorching spot. 

However upon touchdown in Japan, she realizes there’s a catch: she has to group up with the present workers — together with Toshiro, the fiercely proficient (and annoyingly good-looking) grandson of the founder.

“This collection is a wealthy mix of meals, self-discovery, and romance, centered round a dysfunctional but endearing work household,” Dealberto advised Selection. “At its core are French and Japanese cuisines: immediately recognizable, beloved worldwide, and visually beautiful. ‘Tokyo Crush’ marks the primary solo creation of Clémence Dargent, one in every of France’s high movie and TV writers,” he added.

“After a great quantity of debate, we selected ‘Tokyo Crush’ as a result of we beloved the potential we noticed for the story in and out of the kitchen,” mentioned Kennedy. “It felt contemporary like a collection with a number of factors of entry for audiences. That includes an ensemble of characters and conflicts which might be ripe for nice comedy: conflict of cultures, custom versus modernity, competitors and will-they/gained’t-they romance. All of which made it singular,” she added.

Salle Commune is a Paris-based unbiased manufacturing firm launched in 2022 by Jonas Ben Haiem et Jean-Felix Dealberto with the monetary backing of Charades. 

Together with Kennedy, the jury included André Béraud, head of scripted, packages and have movies, ICI Radio-Canada Télé (Canada); Henriette Marienlund, head of drama, DR Drama (Denmark); José Pastor, head of drama and fiction, RTVE (Spain) and Frank Seyberth, head of co-production, worldwide fiction, ZDF (Germany).

“The Co-Professional Pitching Periods are some of the anticipated components of the Sequence Mania Discussion board and we’re delighted to be giving the €50,000 prize to Tokyo Crush. Within the difficulties of in the present day’s world, I’m delighted to see {that a} romance comedy took the highest prize.  That is simply what the viewers wants throughout this time,” added Herszberg.