With international successes Hide & Seek and Those Who Stayed under her belt, Kateryna Vyshnevska, former head of development and coproductions at Ukrainian prodco Film.UA, is now making her mark as an independent producer, acting as a bridge between UK and CEE coproductions.

Kateryna Vyshnevska

Much has happened since Kateryna Vyshnevska produced international hit Hide & Seek – not least a war in her home country of Ukraine – but as a producer from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the TV series still remains one the proudest achievements of her career to date: “It’s my only project that has aired in the UK and you can still go to Channel4.com and it’s there,” Vyshnevska explains. As she points out, “as any non-English-language producer will tell you, it’s very difficult to get a UK broadcaster. But I did manage to do that. And yeah, I’m very proud of that.”

Another high point for her is receiving an Honorary Producer Award at last year’s TV Beats Forum, the strand of Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event that focuses on the drama series market’s needs and trends. The goal of the award is “to spotlight a prominent and inspiring figure from our region, covering the Nordics, Baltics and Central Eastern Europe, who has made a significant impact in the field of TV drama production,” according to Petri Kemppinen and Roosa Toivonen, co-heads of TV Beats Forum.

However, for Vyshnevska, such public acknowledgement is awkward for her to bring up in an interview: “My mum brought me up with the ‘never brag’ mentality”, she confides, though she accepts “[the award is] kind of a big deal and has a bearing on what I do in CEE.”

So what bearing has Vyshnevska had on the CEE content sector? For the first 15 years of her career, the former economics student worked for Ukraine’s Film.UA, one of the largest film and TV production companies in the region. “I do not have any formal education connecting me to media,” explains Vyshnevska. “I was lucky in that some of the owners of Film.UA believed that I’m teachable and that I have what it takes to become a producer or an international exec. So, they gave me this opportunity; I did go through sales, acquisitions and format adaptation – and eventually I moved into producing.”

Film.UA’s Ukrainian crime drama Hide & Seek

Already based in London when she was hired by Film.UA, this put Vyshnevska in an ideal position to represent the company internationally, while working across its various departments. “They had the vision to understand that if you want to do something international then you have to be close to the market, and being based in Ukraine at that time, even going to Mipcom was very complicated because you need to apply for a visa and wait for a long time, so you couldn’t really do anything on the spur of the moment.”

Film.UA’s first major international project was the thriller Hide & Seek, the style of which was a nod to Nordic noir. “It was very ambitious for Ukraine, it really was,” emphasises Vyshnevska, who describes it as “the first high-end series to be produced in Ukraine and locally financed.”

Notably, though, it was also part-financed by Russia. “Now, that seems completely impossible,” says Vyshnevska, alluding to the war raging in her country since Russia invaded in February 2022, an event that changed everything for her and her fellow Ukrainians at home and abroad.

“We were not the same people after the war began, and I’m not even talking about the personal drama of just having to deal with the war,” she notes. “I’m talking in terms of what we do [professionally]; all of a sudden you wake up and realise that whichever stories you were working on […] everything has reset literally to zero.”

As a Ukrainian producer, Vyshnevska was used to working within small budgets by international standards, but nothing had prepared her for losing all funding overnight. “Figuring out how to get high-end projects financed outside of Ukraine, that was always the norm. I reached a point where I was feeling like, ‘Oh, I got it. I know how to work it’. And then war comes… I had all these stories in the pipeline, a lot of them had partners attached and they were at various stages of development, but basically overnight they became meaningless, you know, like because how can we be doing those stories… You have to speak your truth, you have speak stories that matter to you personally.”

This led to the making of Those Who Stayed, a project Vyshnevska says was “full of meaning” for everyone who worked on it. “It was a proper collaboration between so many talented people in Ukraine and so many international partners. And I think we all felt that I never had this feeling of purpose to this extent as when I was working on Those Who Stayed,” she recalls.

The six-part series was unique in that it was a Ukrainian story in the Ukrainian language but fully funded outside of Ukraine. Co-developed by Film.UA and Germany’s Seven.One Studios International (formerly Red Arrow Studios International), the series was coproduced by Film.UA, SVT in Sweden, NRK in Norway and YLE in Finland for Ukraine’s 1+1 Media.

Film.UA coproduced series Those Who Stayed

The anthology series is inspired by true events that happened in Kyiv in the first few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but Vyshnevska is keen to point out this is not a war drama: “It’s about normal people like all of us who wake up one day to a completely new reality, yet they do not become overnight heroes. They still have their families to deal with, they still have to go to work, they still have to walk their dogs.” The series’ characters and themes resonated far and wide, selling to multiple international territories, including Canada (CBC), France (France Télévisions) and Australia (SBS).

Those Who Stayed also won the DQ Craft Award at the C21 International Drama Awards at Content London in 2023.

It was following this event that Vyshnevska, by then head of development and coproductions at Film.UA, announced she was leaving after 15 years at the company. “It really is a fantastic company to have worked for and I’m still keeping the relationship with them, but it did feel like I needed to see what else I can do and also discover if I can do it on my own,” she explains.

Another important driver was “to work more broadly in Central and Eastern Europe” and bridge CEE as a region with other territories. “Being independent gives me this opportunity,” says Vyshnevska, who notes that the region finds itself in a stronger position internationally in post-peak TV. “What I do would not have mattered so much [before] because Nordic producers or British producers, they would not give a second thought to working with CEE. They didn’t need us.

“Now the conversations that I’m having in all these countries and beyond, it’s completely different. They don’t have the money, commissioners cannot put in anywhere close to 100% of financing, so they also need to do what I have been doing for a long time, to figure out how can you produce cheaper and who are your organic partners? So this is where I come in because I can be this bridge.”

One of the first projects Vyshnevska has helped pull together since going solo is Moloch, a Canal+ three-part political thriller set after the assassination of the president of the Czech Republic that will premiere on the streaming service in the Czech Republic and Slovakia on May 27.

Moloch, one of the first projects Vyshnevska has helped pull together since going solo

The project is produced by Czech prodco Bionaut and Slovakia’s Raketa with filming taking place in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine last year. Vyshnevska, who is on board as a co-operating producer alongside Jakub Košťál, was instrumental in getting the project fully funded, bringing in Film.UA to provide production services and Eurimages funding to complete the budget.

“My role was to help them figure out where the rest of the money comes from. By introducing a Ukrainian storyline into the project, it allowed us to make this story much more relevant and topical, but also attach Ukrainian partners that brought down the budget, and we were able to apply to Eurimages’ pilot programme for copro series, and that basically wrapped the financing for us.”

Vyshnevska is currently working on two other coproduction projects from the region, the thriller Girl From Tallinn, a coproduction between Zolba Productions (Estonia), Film.UA Group (Ukraine) and Agitprop (Bulgaria), and Bella & the Beast, an 8×60’ crime returning procedural series set in Budapest that Vyshnevska says has the potential to become a CEE-UK coproduction.

The idea for Bella & the Beast comes from UK writer Jake Riddell (Grantchester, The Bill, Death in Paradise) and tells the story of a disgraced British agent Bella (the Beauty) who gets a teaching job at a Budapest criminology university. After the local dean is murdered on campus, she inadvertently gets involved and helps solve the crime and clear Professor Gabor (the Beast), on whom suspicion falls.

Vyshnevska has partnered with Hungarian-based producer Gabor Krigler of Joyrider, the former creative exec at HBO Max Europe, who has pivoted towards English-language coproductions since setting up his prodco in 2019. Krigler “has huge experience developing premium drama,” says Vyshnevska, who notes that a point of interest about Bella & the Beast is that it is location-driven. “Our story is set in Budapest, which is one of those places that can truly be a character in a story, absolutely gorgeous and instantly recognisable,” she notes.

Girl From Tallinn, which was shortlisted for last year’s Content Drama Series Pitch, is looking to film later this year, but needs to secure the remaining €250,000 (US$264,000) out of the €1.1m budget.

Unusually, the project has been commissioned by Estonia’s pubcaster ERR and pan-Baltic VoD platform Go3 but from a story that originates from Ukraine, according to Vyshnevska, who describes it as a tale of redemption set in Tallinn and Kiev. “There are two storylines and two timelines that happen in between modern-day Tallinn and Kiev as well as Tallinn and Kiev of the 1990s.” Latvia’s LTV has pre-bought the title.

Vyshnevska’s experience of navigating the complex landscape of coproduction treaties, film fund financing and broadcaster requirements, stands her in good stead as she goes it alone – and she’s confident her timing has hit the sweet spot too. “I like to think that I’m capable of thinking outside the box. I do know the whole region inside and out and there is enough talent and enough experience in the region, so I think it is perfect timing right now to be doing what I’m doing.”