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U.S. director-screenwriter Paul Schrader will serve as president of the features jury of the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival, which runs from Aug. 16 to 23.

Schrader will be joined on the jury by Swedish actor and producer Noomi Rapace, Finnish director-writer Juho Kuosmanen, Sarajevo-born, Paris-based director, writer and editor Una Gunjak, and Slovenian actor Sebastian Cavazza.

The jury will announce the winners of the Heart of Sarajevo awards on Aug. 23.

Schrader first made his mark as a screenwriter with “Taxi Driver” (1976), directed by Martin Scorsese, and his collaboration with Scorsese continued with films like “Raging Bull” (1980).

He made his directorial debut with “Blue Collar” (1978) and went on to direct critically acclaimed films such as “American Gigolo” (1980) and “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985).

In 2017, he wrote and directed “First Reformed,” which earned him an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay.

Recent projects include “The Card Counter” (2021), “Master Gardener” (2022) and “Oh Canada...

Germany’s Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg Names New Boss

Influential German funding body Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg is getting a new Managing Director. Sarah Duve-Scmid will succeed Kirsten Niehuus in the middle of next year. Duve-Scmid was previously a deputy board member and head of funding at the Leiterin der Förderabteilung bei der Filmförderanstalt (Federal Funding Agency). She was also Managing Director of Vision Kino. Niehuus is retiring in 2025, and a supervisory board picked her successor, who will work alongside Helge Jürgens, who is to remain Managing Director of Games and New Media until mid-2028. “With the Supervisory Board’s decision, the Medienboard is moving towards a continued successful future,” said Florian Graf, Head of the Berlin Senate Chancellery and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Medienboard. “Building on the great 20 years of work by Kirsten Niehuus, who made the Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan region the center of German film, Sarah Duve-Schmid stands for...

The cast of the Asacha Media-backed Spanish-Serbian thriller series Scar (Cicatriz) has taken shape.

Cameras are rolling today in Spain on the European co-production from Plano a Plano, Dopamine and Adrenalin. Milena Radulovic, Juanlu González, Luis Fernández will lead the scripted series, with Stefan Kapicic, Mladen Sovilj, Goran Susljik and Julen Serrano also attached.

Radulovic is known for Serbian-British drama series Besa and Russian thriller Superdeep, while González starred in Netflix’s Valeria and the popular Spanish TV crime series La Caza, La Otra Mirada and features including Operación Camarón.

Fernández is known for roles in Antena 3 fantasy series Los Protegidos, and other shows such as A Tres Metros Sobre el Cielo, Desaparecidos and Servir y Proteger.

Scar is billed as follows: “An enigmatic woman with a mysterious scar across her face, Irina (Radulovic) has lived with the emotional scars of tragedy since she was a young child and ever since,...

When it comes to creative pedigree, it would be hard to argue with the bona fides of Bosnian crime drama “The Hollow,” which was co-created by Oscar-winning director Danis Tanović (“No Man’s Land”) and had a splashy premiere Saturday night at the Sarajevo Film Festival. The series is directed by Tanović and Bosnian filmmaker Aida Begić, whose latest feature, “A Ballad,” also received the red-carpet treatment this week in Sarajevo’s official competition.

More than just a prestige drama from a region that’s increasingly exporting its shows to the world, however, “The Hollow” could represent a paradigm shift in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, where global streaming services have been acquiring titles such as “The Paper” (Netflix) and “The Silence” (HBO Max) but are yet to put significant investment into local production.

“The Hollow” marks the first foray into original drama by Bosnia’s Bh Telecom, which plans...

The Sarajevo International Film Festival has unveiled the nominees for its second annual TV awards with 17 series from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Slovenia represented across the nominees.

The local series up for awards are: Advokado, Besa 2, Block 27, Black Wedding, Strange Kind of Loves, Dolina rož, Awake, Lenin’s Park, Crazy, Confused, Normal, Underneath 2, Mrkomir I, Bad Blood, The Last Socialist Artefact, United Brothers, Killers of My Father 5, The Silence and Time of Evil.

This year, the award categories have expanded to include drama series and comedy and winners will be honored with the fest’s lauded Heart of Sarajevo award, a prize usually given to the festival’s competition winner.

The Sarajevo Film Festival established the awards for TV series last year, with the aim of promoting and showcasing the highest quality regional television series in the past 12 months to promote their international placement.

Paris-headquartered content creator Asacha Media Group (Amg) has acquired a majority stake in the U.K.’s Red Planet Pictures, producers of hit shows “Sanditon” and “Death in Paradise.”

Red Planet, led by joint MDs, Belinda Campbell and Alex Jones, was founded in 2006 by showrunner Tony Jordan, who now serves as executive chair. The deal will see Red Planet Pictures tap into Amg’s pan-European network of leading producers to further pursue local adaptations and co-productions, and also grow their business in emerging markets like the Middle East and Eastern Europe, where Jordan has created long running dramas “Besa” for Serbian Television and “Al Mirath” for Mbc.

Jordan, Campbell and Jones will become minority shareholders in Amg alongside funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management, L.P., founders and other managers of Amg’s production companies who also reinvested in the group.

With this investment, Amg is steadily increasing its U.

As it ramps up original productions, Middle Eastern broadcaster Mbc is launching lavish 1980s-set Arabic crime drama ‘Rashash,’ created by Britain’s Tony Jordan (“EastEnders”) and touted as its most ambitious Saudi series to date.

Directed by another Brit, Collin Teague, whose credits include “Doctor Who,” “Rashash” is based on the true story of a Saudi Arabian drug trafficker convicted of murder and other crimes after being caught by the police in Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s, according to promotional materials.

The eight-part “Rashash” series will drop Jan. 21 on Mbc’s Shahid VIP — the rapidly growing revamped streaming service that was launched a year ago and has gone from 100,000 subscribers in January 2020 to more than 1 million paying customers, Mbc claims.

Another Arabic crime series created by Tony Jordan, “Blood Oath,” co-produced by Mbc with Lebanon-based Eagle Films, which is an Arabic adaptation of Jordan’s thriller series “Besa,” originally...

Mbc Studios, the Saudi-owned production unit of top Middle Eastern free-to-air satellite network Mbc Group is set to launch “Blood Oath,” an Arabic crime series written by Britain’s Tony Jordan.

The announcement comes as Dubai-based Mbc Studios, set up in 2018 and headed by former president of NBCUniversal International Peter Smith, is making a major push into high-end Arabic scripted content to help kick-start a film and TV industry in Saudi Arabia.

Mbc last week at a Dubai gala launched a new version of its Shahid streaming platform and said it is raising investment in drama productions “fourfold,” though no figures were disclosed.

“Blood Oath,” which was shot in Lebanon, Greece and Cyprus, and co-produced by Mbc with Lebanon-based Eagle Films, is an Arabic adaptation of Jordan’s Albanian thriller series “Besa,” originally produced in Serbia in 2018 by Adrenalin.

Jordan, who created the series, has adapted into an Arabic context...