Welcome on board!
We are delighted to introduce this year's highly qualified jury for the Writers' Vision Pitch 2025. The team of industry experts will actively support us in selecting the most promising series projects in the pre-development phase that have been submitted to us for the Call To Projects. Eight writers will be invited to present their series to an audience of producers, distributors, investors and potential partners live on stage at SERIENCAMP CONFERENCE 2025.
We are now pleased to present our jury for the Writers' Vision Pitch, consisting of Gabor Krigler, Lenka Szántó, Sophie Toth and Thomas Kren.
Gabor Krigler
Gabor’s career began on the writing staff of a daily serial at the Australian-German firm Grundy UFA in 1999. He became a Creative Executive at the Budapest office of HBO Europe in 2010. In 2019, Gabor founded his company, Joyrider, to create and develop high-end scripted content for the international market. Besides working for hire internationally as a writer-producer and managing the Joyrider slate, Gabor is also Head of Studies at the series-related programs of the Midpoint Institute and a guest tutor at various international drama series workshops while doing project consulting and story editing worldwide.
Lenka Szántó
Creative Producer, tv Nova/VOYO, Czech Republic
Former journalist, scriptwriter, trained development executive, experienced producer. Supervising a wide variety of tv products in all development and production stages. With a deep knowledge of all the specifics of true stories development (Lenka wrote a script for two part tv movie Metanol, later nominated for Czech Lion Award 2018) she tends to specialize on this genre although she has a history in developing comedies as well (eg: Národní Házená, released on VOYO in 2022).
Another piece, drama based on true events Jitřní záře (Morning Glow), was premiered on VOYO in the summer of 2022 and the script to the highly discussed series was adapted to a book just a few months ago.
Spy thriller Extractors became the most successful release on VOYO platform of 2023, was later picked up by sales agent Keshet International and also greenlighted by Nova for a second season.
Currently, a light mystery series made by Bionaut production company with cooperation with Lenka premieres on the main linear channel of TV Nova with a huge audience response and numbers that are undoubtedly declaring the What Haunts Us series the hit of a season.
Sophie Toth
Sophie Toth studied journalism, film studies, and economic and social history at the University of Zurich. During her studies, she worked in post-production as an in-house producer before taking on the same role in the Netherlands for two years. After returning to Switzerland in 2007, she transitioned to the production side as a freelancer.
In 2013, Sophie joined the commercial film production company Shining Film as a permanent employee and became a partner in 2020. From then on, she built up Shining Film’s fiction department and became the producer of the cult series Tschugger.
In 2024, Sophie spun off the fiction department she had established at Shining Film and founded her own production company, shining nice. From that point forward, she has exclusively produced independent films. The two companies now pursue a joint umbrella brand strategy.
shining nice currently has two full-time employees and collaborates with freelancers on a project basis. The company focuses on commercially successful film projects.
Sophie is a single mother to her son Bob (*2006) and lives in the heart of Zurich.
Thomas Kren
Thomas Kren works as a Development Executive at Bavaria Fiction. Since 2024, he has been leading the development department as a creative and strategic interface.
Previously, the Austrian native specialized as a Creative Producer in high-end streaming projects and writers' rooms. With over fifteen years of experience as a screenwriter, dramaturge, and editor, the HFF Munich graduate has worked for ProSiebenSat.1 and SevenPictures, where he oversaw successful novel adaptations and feature film projects.