Local challenges force global outlook for Slovakia’s Nutprodukcia

Jakub Viktorín, co-founder of Nutprodukcia, seeks ‘brave international TV commissioners’ as the Slovak prodco moves into TV series with political drama like its Series Mania pitch winner Our People.

Slovak production company Nutprodukcia was founded in 2015 by producers Jakub Viktorín, Tomáš Hrubý and Pavla Janoušková Kubečková, as a sister company to Czech prodco Nutprodukce.

The Bratislava-based company’s background is in feature films, but it is now expanding into series with political drama Our People (Naši ľudia) – the winner of the Series Mania copro pitch last month.

The 6×52’ miniseries is based on the real-life murders in 2018 of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, and the national scandal that ensued.

The drama focuses on the young couple, who are at home making wedding plans over dinner when they are interrupted by a knock at the door. Kuciak answers and is immediately shot through the chest.

“The murders caused huge social outrage, causing our government to fall because the person who possibly ordered the murders had been connected to the government on several occasions,” explains Viktorín.

While the assassins and others involved in the murders have been convicted, the instigator has not, and Slovakia’s prime minister at the time of the attack has since returned to power.

“The case is still open and we are facing the situation that no broadcaster in Slovakia wishes to collaborate on the project,” Viktorín says. “Our only hope now is to create the series as an international coproduction, so we are seeking brave, international TV commissioners who would like to join us.

“The strength of the miniseries is that on one hand it is for the local audience who know about the case of Ján Kuciak, so it should be appealing to them because it will be really specific in the storytelling and in the details of what happened throughout the case.

“On the other hand, for the international audience who don’t know anything about the case, it should be strong on an emotional level as they learn the story of the journalist, his fiancée and their family who were left after their murders.”

Our People is directed by Tereza Nvotová and written by Miro Sifra. The series is based on interviews with the victims’ families and 50,000 pages of police case files. As the winner of the 15 projects presented at the Series Mania copro pitch, it has received a €50,000 (US$54,000) prize.

The show’s international trajectory will have been helped by Series Mania pitch jury president Nina Lederman, Sony Pictures Television’s executive VP of global scripted development and programming, describing Our People as “a smart, thoughtful, compelling story that enlightens and entertains while giving power to truth.”

Nutprodukcia’s overall mission for the projects it produces is to work with local talent “on an international level,” according to Viktorín, by creating local projects it can take to the global market.

“Our aim is to work with local writers and directors and to help them develop their stories. Mostly we are focused on fiction feature films, but we have done animated features and documentaries, and are now starting to explore [drama] series. We are trying to develop our slate in balance of TV projects first and then fiction features,” the exec says.

Although Nutprodukcia as a company is new to the world of series, Viktorín, Hrubý and Kubečková previously produced 2022 miniseries Suspicion (Podezrení) with Czech sister company Nutprodukce for Czech pubcaster Česká Televize and France’s Arte.

Nutprodukcia’s Prague-based sister company Nutprodukce was also the prodco behind HBO Europe’s Burning Bush, a 2013 three-part drama that focused on Jan Palach, who killed himself in Wenceslas Square in Prague after the Soviet Union sent troops into Czechoslovakia, as well as 2016 follow-up Pustina (8×60’, Wasteland), which told the story of a mining village on the verge of extinction.

In addition to Our People, Nutprodukcia is in very early development on a series with the working title Freedom, directed by Michal Blaško (Podezrení) and written by Jakub Medvecký.

In the features space, Nutprodukcia is currently in post-production on Caravan, a Czech-Slovak-Italian film directed by Zuzana Kirchnerová and written by Kirchnerová and Tomáš Bojar. Caravan centres on a single mother who has to take her mentally disabled son with her on her holiday, having initially planned a solo two-week trip.

Solitude, meanwhile, is a feature written by Rúnar Rúnarsson about a farmer who relocates to the capital and makes friends with a 10-year-old paper delivery boy, while I’m Not Everything I Want to Be is a non-dialogue animated film written by Hynek Trojánek for children about a chameleon and kiwi onboard Noah’s Ark.

In pre-production is Cowgirl, a Czech-Slovak-Polish copro written by Medvecký and directed by Blaško. The coming-of-age drama follows a teenage girl and keen horse rider, whose world begins to fall apart when she finds out her father is involved in agricultural corruption.

Coproductions are crucial to Nutprodukcia, according to Viktorín. In addition to the Czech Republic, Poland and Italy, the prodco previously partnered with Germany on film Victim, about an immigrant single mother from Ukraine living in a small Czech town whose son is assaulted. It also teamed up with Hungary on animated feature Tony, Shelly & the Magic Light, about the friendship and adventures of a peculiar girl and a boy born with a unique feature that makes him glow.

“We don’t do any project without a coproduction. Slovakia is a small country so they are all international projects because we cannot raise that much money to bring enough production value locally,” the exec says, adding that European copros will become all the more important amid the global economic crisis.

On the subject of the global financial downturn, inflation has meant the budgets for production are losing their value, Viktorín adds, despite the same amount of money being available.

“With inflation, we are still talking about more or less the same money, but there is less value to it. The public broadcasters are more picky and it’s much more complicated to get into their slots as there are more and more projects every year,” he says.

Viktorín cites HBO Europe as a former strong partner in the CEE region, but notes that is no longer the case since the Warner Bros Discovery-owned brand stopped commissioning local originals in various countries across the continent. The exec says the streaming originals space in Slovakia still hasn’t really taken off but notes activity by Canal+ in the Czech Republic, as well as Comcast-Paramount joint venture SkyShowtime.

Despite companies like HBO pulling out of the local originals space, a move that has been followed by other platforms in various countries in recent months, Viktorín says he still sees increased interest in local content from the global streamers.

“They are interested in local content on their platforms because that’s how they can attract the audience in each territory in the best possible way. This demand is getting stronger and stronger from year to year. It’s just about the capacities of the markets and how much local content they can produce per year,” he says.

Over the next few years, Viktorín says Nutprodukcia will continue to build its slate of “quite challenging but hopefully fruitful projects. We have, I think, a lot of nice and challenging projects for the audience in the upcoming years,” he says.