A new high-profile event dedicated to global TV series is being launched in Italy with “Bridgerton” star Adjoa Andoh, Evangeline Lilly (“Lost”) and Italy’s ‘Godfather of Disco’ Giorgio Moroder on board to be feted with career awards. 

Also set for tributes at the new Italian Global Series Festival (IGSF) are the locally popular Italian comic actor and director Carlo Verdone and beloved actress Elena Sofia Ricci, who recently starred in pubcaster RAI’s top-rated Holocaust drama “La farfalla impazzita.”

IGSF is being touted as a reincarnation of the Roma Fiction Festival, which ran in the Eternal City between 2006 and 2016 and was prompted at the time by an urgency felt by Italy’s TV production community to expand its horizons.

Unlike its predecessor, the new TV event will run in two adjacent Italian seaside resort towns, Riccione and Rimini, with dates set for June 21-28. That slot will add one more seaside event to the country’s crowded June calendar, which already comprises the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily that runs June 10-14 and Filming Italy Sardegna set for June 20-23.

Italian journalist Marco Spagnoli — who is deputy director of Rome’s MIA Market — has been appointed artistic director of IGSF, which is organized by Italy’s TV producers’ association APA in partnership with the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE).

The plan is for the inaugural IGSF edition to have both an international and an Italian competition strand and feature first-look screenings, keynotes and onstage conversations. These will be moderated by Piera Detassis, president of the David di Donatello Awards, Italy’s equivalent of the Oscars, and by Laura Delli Colli, who heads Italy’s film journalists’ union.

IGSF jury members will include two-time Palme d’Or-winning director Bille August, whose TV series “The Count of Monte Cristo” has been a massive hit in Italy, Oscar-nominated director Cristina Comencini (“Don’t Tell”) and Paolo Genovese, who wrote and directed global megahit “Perfect Strangers.”

The fest’s full program will be unveiled in early May.