Dutch Core heads to Mipcom with a teen microdrama that already carries a buyer’s favourite kind of proof: 15 million YouTube and TikTok views in its home market.
My Last Summer looks at cancer through a summer crush and first love, told from a young person’s point of view. It leads a Dutch Core slate that pairs difficult subject matter with youth and history titles, part of the sales arm’s push to give public-interest programming a commercial edge in Cannes.
What the slate contains
- My Last Summer – a digital-first teen microdrama about illness and first love, with 15 million views across YouTube and TikTok.
- The Drug Delta: The Road to a Narco State – an investigative documentary fronted by Sinan Can and Rudi Vranckx, asking whether the Netherlands and Belgium are edging toward narco-state conditions as it traces South American cartel routes to European ports.
- Those Left Behind – a coming-of-age miniseries about an 11-year-old whose summer plans collapse when his mother cannot afford a holiday; already acquired by YLE in Finland and NRK in Norway.
- The Great Offensive – a historical docudrama about the Allied liberation of Western Europe in the Second World War.
Why 15M views changes the pitch
For buyers, the 15 million figure is not a vanity number. It is audience evidence that a difficult youth topic – illness, grief and first love – can draw a large young audience when a show is built for social feeds rather than a linear slot. That helps de-risk a title that might otherwise look like a niche cancer story on paper.
The number also reflects a more platform-native approach to distribution. Instead of asking a buyer to imagine demand, Dutch Core can point to demand that already exists on YouTube and TikTok, where younger viewers are actually spending time.
The sales logic
Dutch Core is the international sales company of NPO, the umbrella body for Dutch public broadcasting, and also handles sales for Flemish public broadcaster VRT and a growing group of Dutch independent producers. That public-service base does not stop it from using commercial signals: the slate ranges from organised crime and war to childhood poverty, mental health and illness.
Lorraine Joore, senior sales executive at Dutch Core, framed the selection around purpose:
“We’re looking for stories that have a clear reason to exist. That might be an investigative documentary offering access to a world that audiences rarely see, a historical story that gives a new perspective on the past or a children’s series exploring something young audiences are experiencing themselves.”
For entertainment marketers and content buyers, the practical read is to treat platform-native metrics as a licensing input. Ask for watch-through and share behaviour, not just total view counts. A difficult subject with strong engagement can be a safer bet than an easy subject with passive reach – and Those Left Behind suggests the approach is already working, with Nordic pre-sales locked before Cannes.
Source: C21media
