Picomedia Options Spy Thriller ‘The Supernotes Affair’

Italian producer Roberto Sessa (“The Sea Exterior”) has snapped up rights to bestselling spy thriller “Supernotes” a couple of CIA-trained Italian intelligence officer who winds up in a Cambodian jail after investigating a delicate scheme to print counterfeit $100 payments in North Korea.

Picomedia chief Roberto Sessa plans to show the e-book – which had beforehand been optioned by Alexandra Milchan’s Los Angeles-based Emjag Productions — right into a high-end TV sequence that he’s pitching to potential companions throughout France’s Sequence Mania competition.

“Supernotes,” which has been printed in additional than 30 international locations, together with the U.S., U.Ok. and France, is the purportedly true story of an Italian undercover agent often known as Agent Kasper who whereas on a mission through the mid-90s to analyze completely counterfeited $100 payments that had been flooding Southeast Asia stumbles into an explosive secret behind them involving the CIA.

This leads the Italian operative to be compelled to spend over a yr in captivity in a detention camp close to Phnom Penh.

In the meantime, again in Rome, a feisty lawyer named Barbara Belli employed by Kasper’s household to work for his launch comes to appreciate that the agent has uncovered one thing so damaging that the CIA needs him silenced.

Sessa, a veteran producer whose Rome-based Picomedia scored a success lately with younger grownup drama “The Sea Exterior,” says he was instantly captivated by the e-book written by Italian journalist Luigi Carletti and Agent Kasper. However he needed to wait till Milchan’s choice expired earlier than lately shopping for the rights immediately from the authors.

“It is a very bold challenge that may in all probability irk People,” stated Sessa, referring to the truth that CIA are indicated because the forex counterfeiting culprits within the e-book. “It’s a delicate subject,” he famous, “So we need to do it from an Italian standpoint.”

The producer, who’s already in talks with potential British and French companions – and Italian and British screenwriters – stated he’s assured that he’ll be capable to mount a co-production to provide the eight-episode present in Italian, English, and Cambodian throughout the subsequent six months.