Every looted statue and every smuggled microchip leaves a trail. Someone dug it up or shipped it out, someone moved it across a border, and somewhere an investigator is trying to follow it back. That trail is the spine of two new true-crime series now in development at Svet Solutions Media: The Stolen Gods and The Gatekeepers.
Both are our own productions, and both join a documentary slate that has grown quickly over the past year.
Tunnels under Pompeii. Temple gods ripped from their pedestals. A one-tonne sculpture smuggled across a border. The Stolen Gods looks at the global trade in looted antiquities through the people who run it and the investigators who refuse to let it go.
The first season is planned as five 60-minute episodes, each built around a single case and told in four acts: the crime scene, the trail, the network and the hunt. The cases take us from the tunnels beneath Pompeii and the 'Ndrangheta's interest in the gold of Magna Graecia, to Mexico and Guatemala, the god thieves of Cambodia and India's Idol Wing, the police unit dedicated to bringing stolen temple deities home.
The Stolen Gods is a Svet Solutions Media production, from an original idea by Eva Morletto.
Advanced AI chips have become the most contested technology of the decade. The Gatekeepers goes inside the specialised US task force of prosecutors and agents working to keep them out of the hands of rival states.
Planned as five 45-minute episodes, the series follows real federal cases, one of them still unfolding as the season is made. It is a procedural as much as a true-crime story: export rules, shell companies, intercepted shipments and the slow, methodical work of building a case. The teaser is complete and available to broadcasters and platforms on request.
The Gatekeepers is a Svet Solutions Media production.
Both series sit where we feel most at home: international investigations that cross borders, languages and jurisdictions. These are stories that cannot be told from a single location. They can take a crew to Calabria one week and Cambodia the next, and they need people who understand how to work with police units, prosecutors and museums, and who know when a source needs time rather than a camera.
That is exactly what our network of crews in 49 countries is built for. The same experience that lets us cover news and live events around the world, quickly and to broadcast standards, gives our documentary work its reach and its access.
The two new series join our other originals. Mafia: Behind the Bloodshed, a Picasso Film production, co-produced with Svet Solutions Media, is now airing on Sky HISTORY in the UK, with its international version, Mafia: Behind the Code, distributed by Blue Ant. The God of Pyongyang, also a Picasso Film production, co-produced with Svet Solutions Media, is in production.
Together they reflect a simple ambition: to keep telling our own stories alongside the broadcast and crew work our clients rely on every day.
Find out more about each title on our Originals page, or get in touch with our team to request the Gatekeepers teaser or discuss a co-production.
