Since launching in Flanders 20 years ago, Caviar has grown into an international production company with offices in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam.
The company is best known at home for the series Tabula Rasa and Clan (recently remade for Apple TV+ as Bad Sisters) and the movie Rebel by Adil and Bilall. Its international credits include the Oscar-winning film Sound of Metal, Caméra d’Or winner War Pony, and Last Swim, which won the Crystal Bear at the Berlinale in 2024, as well as the Dutch-Belgian series The Jewish Council which won the Golden Calf for Best Series in the Netherlands in the same year.
Moresnet
Heading Caviar’s list of recent co-productions is the mystery thriller series Moresnet, which is set in a real village located at the point where Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands meet. “So, it was a very natural co-production between these three countries,” says producer Helena Vlogaert.
The story centres on Ben, a man with a troubled past who returns to the village after the death of his father. When he digs up a time capsule he and his friends buried 22 years before, he finds a list with all their names on, and the dates of their deaths.
The series was devised by director Frank Van Passel, scriptwriter Jef Hoogmartens and co-showrunner Jonas Van Geel. To bring it to life, Caviar teamed with local partner Lompvis, Dutch producer Pupkin and Flair Film in Germany. The international spirit of Moresnet continues on screen, with Flemish actors such as Boris Van Severen (Baptiste) and Joke Emmers (Assisen) working alongside Pierre Bokma (Will) from the Netherlands and Leonie Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge) from Germany.
Early financing came from Flemish streaming service Streamz, with further local support from the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF), Screen Flanders and the Belgian tax shelter. International distribution is handled by Newen Connect.
We really like to work with local talent and combine it with strong international talent.
Professor T & Before We Die
An particular part of Caviar’s co-production work is a structure it set up in 2020 to help UK drama specialist Eagle Eye produce English-language remakes of foreign formats.
The idea is to bring 80 per cent of the shoot, as well as a big part of the post-production to Belgium, where it benefits from the tax shelter system and our very generous and flexible soft funding systems.
Examples include the crime series Before We Die, which originated in Sweden, and the Flemish crime series Professor T. “The funny thing is that we are doing an English-language remake of a Flemish format, shooting everything in Belgium but with locations standing in for Cambridge,” says Kerremans.
Support from Screen Flanders is decisive in this process. “In Professor T and Before We Die it was one of the driving forces that brought these English-language remakes to Flanders,” he says.
Co-producing with Caviar
Caviar’s international reach and in-house resources set it apart from its peers in Flanders. For example, it can draw on the capabilities of in-house post-production facility Loom to meet the demands of projects with high-end VFX needs, and step into financing thanks to its tax shelter company Caviar Film Financing.
The ideal projects are those that blend with Caviar’s own creative DNA. “We are mostly looking for projects that are ‘genre with an edge’, and we prefer to work with long-standing, trustworthy partners who speak the same creative language as us,” says Kerremans.
Caviar / Lompvis