SFF: Production companies from the US and Slovak Republic are adapting a 2011 book about life in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s into a miniseries for TV.

Convictions (4×60’) comes from Bratislava-based production company PubRes and New York- and LA-based consortium Vespucci Group, backed by Dorfman Media Holdings.

The €2.6m (US$2.9m) project has attracted €68,000 in the form of development funds from Czech pubcaster Česká Televize and the Slovak Audiovisual Fund.

Creator/writer/director Tereza Nvotova (Filthy, The Lust of Power) and writers Barbora Namerova (Filthy) and Max Benitz (Master & Commander), as well as producer Daniel Turcan (Marjorie Prime), are here at the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) seeking further finance.

Johnny Galvin (Hand of God, White House Down), Zuzana Mistrikova (The Insect) and Lubica Orechovska (The Teacher) are also producing.

The miniseries is a dramatisation of Hungarian writer Jo Langer’s memoir about her life with her husband Oskar in Czechoslovakia, entitled Convictions: My Life With a Good Communist.

After surviving the Holocaust, the Langers moved to Czechoslovakia. Despite being a committed Communist, Oskar Langer was arrested by his party and spent 12 years working in a uranium mine – but nevertheless remained committed to his ideology.

“We came across Jo’s memoir after my Slovak grandmother recommended that I should read it,” said Turcan.

“The series is about an unconventional love triangle between Jo, Oskar and the Communist Party,” added Nvotova. “She refuses to give up on him, and he refuses to give up on his beliefs.

“The millennial generation is fascinated by dystopian narratives. But this is not the concocted reality of a fictional future. This has already happened. By recounting one woman’s experience, we might show how easily it could all happen again,” she said in her SFF presentation, part of the Prague-based Midpoint TV training and development programme.

The series is being shot in the Czech, English, Slovak, Hungarian languages, and production is due to take place in the first half of 2020.

A total of nine dramas are being presented to SFF delegates as part of the Midpoint 2019 programme: six TV series from Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary and Slovakia and three web series from Slovenia, Hungary and Slovakia.