Cinema Valli, 17.7. at 12:00
The first international workshop and pitching programme, Make the Scene!, is aimed at developing TV series screenplays. TV series from Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, and Austria can compete in this programme, with no limitations in terms of form, number of episodes, and genre, but under the conditions that the projects have not been financed or awarded at public calls or similar competitions. The six selected finalists will take part in two workshop models. The first will be held online, under the mentorship of Greek screenwriter Nicos Panayotopoulos, while the second will take place in person during the Festival and will be followed by the pitching to the jury. The best project will receive a 10,000 EUR prize and an opportunity to develop the project further with United Media, the partner company of this programme.
MENTOR: Nicos Panayotopoulos
(1963) is a Greek journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. He started his career writing for newspapers, articles, and TV, but turned to writing novels and screenplays in the early 1990s. He wrote a number of screenplays for short films, TV series, and feature films. In 1996, he won the Best Screenplay Award for the film Traunts at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. In 2000, he won the first prize in a screenwriting competition with False Alarm, which was made into a film of the same name six years later. He co-wrote the films The King (Golden Pyramid at the Cairo International Film Festival in 2003), The Wake (Best Screenplay at the Golden Nights International Film Festival in Moscow in 2006), My Brother and I (1998), and Totally Married (Best Screenplay at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 2003). He wrote a collection of short stories, The Guilt of Materials (1997), and four novels: Ziggy from Marfan – The Diary of an Alien (1998), The Gene of Doubt (1999), Icon (2003), and The Children of Cain (2011), which have been translated into a number of languages.
JURY:
Goran Bogdan
Goran Bogdan is a theatre, TV, and film actor born in 1980 in Široki Brijeg. He graduated in acting from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb in 2012. From 2010 to 2018 he worked at the Zagreb Youth Theatre, and saw his first success in the films Sonja and the Bull and Some Other Stories. He was a part of a number of domestic and regional projects, with the most recent ones being Forever Hold Your Peace and The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, which has just won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. Goran Bogdan is a significant name in the world of TV as well, and his more important roles were in the most successful domestic series such as Silence and The Last Socialist Artefact. He also had a role in the popular American series Fargo. He won a number of awards, and was nominated for Best Actor by the European Film Academy for his role in Father directed by Srdan Golubović, which makes him the first Croatian actor to receive a nomination for this award.
Nataša Buljan
Nataša Buljan is Group Fiction Development Director at United Media and Head of the Content Development Department at Nova TV, Croatia. She started her carrier in advertising as a copywriter before becoming a creative director of many successful advertising campaigns. In 2013 she collaborated on the script of the critically acclaimed crime drama series Rest in Peace for Croatian National Television and worked as a writer on the Nova TV hit drama series Stella. After the hit telenovela for Nova TV in 2017-2018, The Pure Love, where she was the author and the head writer, Nataša joined Nova TV to lead the Content Development Department. From January 2024 she holds the position of Group Fiction Development Director at United Media.
Miroslav Mogorović
Miroslav Mogorović was born in 1972. in Zemun, Serbia. He started working as a convention and festival manager in Serbian National Congress and Convention Centre in 1995. Same year, he started working as assistant managing director on “Palić Film Festival”. In 2002, he became executive producer of “Belgrade International Film Festival”, biggest and oldest Serbian film festival. He remains executive producer till autumn 2006. In the frames of “34th Belgrade International Film Festival” he established the “Belgrade Industry Meetings B2B”, with focus on non-EU countries. He is the Head of B2B until today. In spring 2004, together with the group of young film professionals, he established “ART & POPCORN Motion Picture Company”, and entered the production market independently. In 2012 after many years of work finally succeeded to restore cinema Fontana in cooperation with the Municipality of New Belgrade.
