Balkan Dramas Build on Region’s Rich Storytelling and ‘Creative Energy’ in Search of Global Breakouts

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias Two buzzy Balkan series were under the spotlight this week at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where local creatives dished on their recipe for turning regional stories into potential breakout hits.

Sunday night saw the red-carpet regional premiere of “Operation Sabre,” a Serbian crime drama that premiered in Canneseries’ Long Form Competition this year.

The show, about the 2003 assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić, is created and directed by Goran Stanković and Vladimir Tagić.

Snezana van Houwelingen, who produced the series for Belgrade-based This and That Productions, in co-production with Martichka Bozhilova (Agitprop) for Radio Television of Serbia, said that the creators were thinking about global audiences from the moment they began developing the script. “From the very beginning, we believed this story had international potential, even if it was a very local event and it takes place in Serbia,” she said. “Everything we did during the development process was related to how to make a TV show [that would] communicate with an international audience.” Anna Rohde, international creative executive at Beta Film Group — whose distribution arm, Beta Film, is repping the series globally — said her company began circling the project as early as 2019, when it won an award during the CineLink Drama pitching sessions in Sarajevo. “From that point, it was very clear that it was very international,” Rohde said.