Named one of the most influential women in the Czech Republic by Forbes magazine, Kamila Zlatušková, founder of The Television Institute and the Serial Killer Festival, has made it her mission to challenge conventional stereotypes on and off the screen in Central and Eastern Europe.
Kamila Zlatušková
Kamila Zlatušková doesn’t shy away from risk-taking – even controversy, some might argue. The screenwriter, producer and director and former Czech TV exec is something of a trailblazer in the Czech content industry, known for producing and directing edgy public service content that challenges stereotypes.
In 2018, she put Brno, her hometown and the Czech Republic’s second largest city after the capital Prague, on the map of the global content business by founding the international festival of TV and online series, Serial Killer, a move some in the Czech TV establishment scoffed at. Fast-forward eight years, though, and the festival is expanding its programme and crossing borders with final preparations for a Serial Killer in Bratislava. It is a move the former student of political science and journalism believes is necessary given the threat to public service television from the country’s current prime minister, Robert Fico, and his pro-Russian government.
“The situation in Slovakia is serious, both socially and politically, and we believe it deserves deeper reflection from within the television industry. Through Serial Killer, we want to respond to these developments, by focusing not only on what kind of content is being produced in Slovakia, but also on the wider social and political context that influences it,” says Zlatušková about the move. “Our goal is to open up a space for meaningful discussion – involving international guests as well as key Slovak decision-makers. We see this as an opportunity to foster dialogue, support creative freedom, and better understand the unique challenges Slovak creators are facing today.”
Zlatušková has over the years learnt to ignore the nay-sayers: “Don’t even try is the most common sentence I’ve heard in my life,” says the mother of two, who among her many other roles, has just published her latest book, Matka na Kolejích (Mother on the Rails), a personal account of travelling Europe by train with small children.
Award-winning Into the Clouds We Gaze
Back in 2016, when Zlatušková was formulating the idea for the first Central and Eastern European (CEE) festival dedicated to TV and web series, she wanted to showcase the lesser-known content and talent from the region that was being overlooked internationally.
“I felt there was quite a lot of quality content [from Central and Eastern Europe] which was not getting visibility [internationally],” she explains about one of her main motivations for setting up the festival. “Whenever I went to Mipcom or other events there were series from Russia or from Poland, but not the best ones – the most expensive ones.
“For me that was disappointing. There was no longer the Iron Curtain but a kind of psychological curtain, that we were too small, that our stories didn’t matter… and right around that time, [the HBO/Sky series] Chernobyl was announced. It was the biggest Eastern European story ever – and it was not being produced by Eastern Europeans. So, I was thinking, let’s do something about that; let’s create a space, a platform for inspiration, and a networking space.”
Serial Killer offers a six-day programme of screenings, premieres, talks by filmmakers and a main competition, all open to the public, but as well as showcasing lesser-known content and talent from the region, another reason for establishing Serial Killer, according to Zlatušková was to create a platform for CEE TV professionals to learn from their western European counterparts. She, therefore, sought the support and input from film and TV experts from western Europe and beyond, including the late Nik Powell, who at the time was head of the National Film & Television School in the UK.
“Nik Powell was our first juror in 2018. He was brilliant and one of the people who was motivating me to take my next steps,” recalls Zlatušková warmly about the British film producer who co-founded Palace Productions with Stephen Woolley (The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game) and later his own company Scala Productions (Fever Pitch, B.Monkey, Last Orders).
As a result, running alongside the festival, is a three-day TV Days conference. “We are trying to explain to the local players that, of course, there can be some local competition, but it’s not a topic anymore because there’s Netflix and there are so many big players now, so they need to be better and the decision-makers from western Europe or from overseas will start to look in this direction,” comments Zlatušková.
The event is currently prepping for its eighth edition in September. “We’re interested in how contemporary scripted series are responding to global crises – whether ecological, technological, political or social,” says Zlatušková. “This doesn’t necessarily mean apocalyptic storylines in the traditional sense. Some series approach this through dark satire, others through intimate human stories set in collapsing systems. It’s about a sense of unease, change, and urgency that feels increasingly present in the most compelling television today.”
Ironically, Serial Killer, came out of a personally uneasy situation for Zlatušková, when in 2016, Czech TV’s multi-genre production division that she was heading up, was suddenly disbanded. At the time, the group was creating cutting-edge documentaries, including the award-winning Into the Clouds We Gaze (2014) and Goat (2015).
Zlatušková’s first taste of TV success came with Ptáčata (Nestlings) in 2010
“Serial Killer was a very personal motivation because before that I was the youngest creative producer for the national broadcaster with my own creative group and a lot of shows,” she says.
The “dismissal”, as Zlatušková’s describes it, led she says to a petition in her support “of almost 1,000 people from film schools and from professionals”. Meanwhile, Prague’s FAMU film school, which she now teaches at and for a period was vice-dean of, issued an open letter about her “forced departure” describing her “efforts to reflect the very mission of public service media on screen” as “acts of courage that won her deserved recognition in the film community and beyond”.
In fact, Zlatušková was first recognised for her edgy brand of public service content provision back in 2010 with Ptáčata (Nestlings), a series about a class of Roma children that would later be nominated for the Civis Media Prize for Integration & Cultural Diversity in Europe. Back then she had just graduated in political science and journalism at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University, having graduated in radio and television dramaturgy and screenwriting at the Theatre Faculty of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno four years prior.
After struggling to find anyone who would hire her in the Czech TV industry, she was preparing to take flight to the UK and work in a bar and hope for “an internship at the BBC”, when she learnt she had in fact been offered a job as documentary commissioner editor at Czech TV, after a gruelling interview. “It was a disaster,” she says, “so, I was the most surprised person in the world, three days later, when I got an email [telling me I’d got the job].”
Keen to tackle thorny issues about marginalised communities, in 2009, Zlatušková left Czech TV to pursue her ambition to direct Ptáčata (she returned to the pubcaster in 2012). Everything about the project was challenging conventional TV. “We decided to shoot the stories of these kids by giving them small cameras,” says Zlatušková, whose aim was, as she puts it, to “kill stereotypes about these kids”. The project was expected to last no longer than a year; in fact, it took 10 years to complete, spawning multiple series, and tracking the children’s lives into adulthood.
Challenging stereotypes about what makes compelling content from CEE is a recurring theme throughout Zlatušková’s career and explains the intriguing name for her festival in Brno. “It’s dark humour. Killing stereotypes about Eastern Europe, that’s basically why we chose the title. In 2016, everything was a crime show, but we were thinking, there are many more topics, not only [stories about] who is the killer or who is the murderer,” she explains.
As well as shaking up the status quo in the Czech TV industry, Zlatušková’s other main goal is to pave the way for a new generation of storytellers to emerge from the CEE region and make their mark on the global stage. This led her to establish The Television Institute in 2021, a new international educational platform based in Brno, in partnership with investor Jiří Hlavenka.
Built on the “three pillars” of “quality television production in all genres, global impact, and challenging the limits of television production and its development in Central and Eastern Europe”, the school has deliberately kept the student cohort small – 45-50 people – with the aim of training them up to in the traditional skills of storytelling as well as the skills to work with AI and digital technology.
“You might be writing excellent scripts, but if you don’t understand this, you’re going to lose this game. It’s just something that you need to know, like a second language. Right now, I think this is the second language you need to learn,” says Zlatušková.
Alongside its own programme of learning, The Television Institute has established various industry training partnerships. These include a two-year scholarship programme in cooperation with CME (TV Nova, Markíza, and Voyo), a mentoring and workshop series with Netflix to empower emerging Czech and Slovak women filmmakers, and a partnership with Prima TV on a long-term programme called Primary Inspiration for internal employee development.
Zlatušková’s dogged determination to challenge the status quo in her industry may have ruffled a few feathers over the years, but it’s also won her admirers. In 2021, she was named among the 150 most influential women in the Czech Republic by Forbes magazine, and in 2023, after a 12-year hiatus in Czech participation, she became the first Czech woman to be awarded the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship, joining a global network of visionary leaders committed to positive change.
But looking ahead, it’s her own experiences – not industry recognition – that are guiding Zlatušková’s ultimate goal to empower a new cohort of CEE content creators to find their voice and achieve international success: “I don’t want them to repeat my experience, where people are saying to you, ‘oh no, don’t even try’. I’m telling them, I believe you will be successful. Just, don’t let people break you down.”
