Nebojša Taraba, co-founder of Croatian producer Drugi Plan, explains how the Beta Film-backed company evolved from factual to scripted, emerging as one of the CEE region’s brightest international drama stars.
It’s two decades since Croatian journalists Nebojša Taraba and Miodrag Sila came up with a plan – a Drugi Plan, to be precise. The production company the pair co-founded in the capital, Zagreb, started out, naturally, according to the former, with a focus on factual programming.
Nebojša Taraba
“Croatia had a great tradition in a filmmaking, drama, cinema and TV, but we simply needed some time to understand everything, so it was quite organic moving from the non-scripted space – more connected with our previous jobs – to doing something as complex as quality drama and high-end documentaries,” he says.
That transition really gathered pace in 2016 when Drugi Plan debuted a show called The Paper (Novine), made for local public broadcaster HRT, at NEM Dubrovnik.
The series, about the hostile takeover of an independent newspaper, caught the eyes of execs from Keshet International and the company struck a deal for overseas distribution. Momentum gathered through Mipcom that year and continued into Series Mania, where Netflix representatives picked up the show as their first Croatian-language drama.
“They put it on in all 190 countries and somehow it put the focus on our region, not only for us and our company but for Croatia and, dare I say, the entire Adria region,” says Taraba.
The attention and plaudits the show garnered meant it wasn’t long before Drugi Plan was working on its next straight scripted commission, this time HBO Europe’s first in the territory. The series, called Success (Uspjeh), is about four strangers whose lives are impacted by a violent event.
“That was the first and unfortunately the only HBO Europe original series from our region,” adds Taraba, mourning the demise of the network’s homegrown programming strategy in the wake of AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner and subsequent sale of WarnerMedia to Discovery.
Drugi Plan made The Paper (Novine) for public broadcaster HRT
“For some reason, they came to us last. We were always watching what was going on in Hungary, Romania, Poland and in the Czech Republic. They were producing quite a lot, but for some reason they never came to the Adria region with original production, but finally they decided and we were lucky.”
Written by Zagreb-based scribe Marjan Alčevski and directed by Oscar-winning Sarajevo-filmmaker Danis Tanović with cast and crew sourced from Slovenia to Macedonia, Success was a truly regional cooperation, incorporating people from all over the former Yugoslavia, says Taraba. This is one of the reasons he was so heartened when the series was picked up by Channel 4 international drama service Walter Presents in the UK, where it aired as Four Strangers, and has also found a new home across Europe via SkyShowtime.
But despite The Paper’s success and the HBO Europe commission, an anticipated flurry of orders for Adria originals from big international streamers failed to materialise. Drugi Plan, like other Croatian prodcos, remained reliant on the mandatory spending quotas imposed on local broadcasters. HRT, for example, provided 90% of the budget for The Paper.
“We realised that we couldn’t wait for big global players to come to us. We needed to take our content and try to find partners around the world, so we did this with our next big project,” Taraba explains.
The series in question is called The Silence (Šutnja) and Taraba says his company managed to set up a coproduction between Croatia, Russia, Ukraine and Germany for the project.
Croatia, Russia, Ukraine and Germany copro The Silence (Šutnja)
But there’s a significant part of the story missing here. The German partner on the show was Beta Film, the Munich-based distributor, which just prior to the pandemic took a majority stake in Drugi Plan. Beta was keen to build its presence across Central and Eastern Europe and for Taraba and Sila the investment not only meant an opportunity to scale their company but also to extend its coproduction tendrils.
The Silence, a story of human and weapons trafficking, provided the perfect vehicle, with HRT, Russia’s Star Media and Ukrainian streamer OLL.TV joining forces and Beta later bringing Germany’s ZDF and Franco-German network Arte on board. HBO Europe, streaming service Topic in the US and Lumière in Benelux were among the subsequent buyers.
Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine had an immediate impact on the production, Taraba explains.
“We made the first series in 2021. We shot it in Osijek, in eastern Croatia, and we had 25 or 26 shooting days in Kyiv. We even premiered the show on OLL.TV. That was December 2021. Unfortunately, just before the Croatian premiere, which was set for March 7, war started and it changed everything in this constellation.”
Drugi Plan was determined to continue with the show, however.
“HRT and Beta both remained as coproduction partners and international distributor. Unfortunately, the companies from Russia and Ukraine don’t exist anymore but we still managed to have five or six shooting days in Kyiv. The project was meant as a trilogy, but due to the changed circumstances we decided to make the best season two we could and stop there.”
HBO Europe original Success (Uspjeh)
While the war continues, evoking still raw memories of the fall of Yugoslavia, and tensions are once again rising in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, Taraba and team are continuing to forge new relationships. “In a way it kind of pushed us even more to explore the possibilities of European coproductions,” he says.
“We have been asked many times, ‘Why don’t you work more in your region?’ This is a reasonable question because Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro together is almost 60 million people speaking the same language. We used to be living in the same country and sharing a lot. We still share a lot but on the other side, our biggest neighbour is Italy. For the average Croatian, Italian is a much closer mentality than Czech or Slovak, for example.”
And so, to Drugi Plan’s latest major projects, one being the world’s first Croatian-Italian coproduction. Titled Greater Adria, this contemporary eco-thriller draws on the discovery of the long-lost continent by scientists in 2019. The company has teamed up with Federation Entertainment-owned Fabula Pictures in Italy and ZDF Studios-backed Nadcon in Germany. Croatia’s HRT and Slovenia’s RTV are on board as coproduction partners, as is Belgium’s Lumière this time.
Volcano is another eco-political drama, this time a coproduction with Icelandic prodco ACT 4. The story follows a crushing volcanic eruption which devastates Iceland and leads to a UN directive relocating the surviving residents to Croatia. The series is based on an original idea by Taraba and Sila and written by ACT 4’s Hörður Rúnarsson.
“We strongly believe that every coproduction in Europe is organic, because that’s what Europe is. It’s really easy to find common ground and we are so close to each other,” says the Drugi Plan co-founder.
“It takes me three hours to drive from Zagreb to Budapest. It’s three hours from Zagreb to Vienna, two-and-a-half to Venice. To get from one side of Europe to the other by plane takes a maximum three hours. We have this mixed history, we communicate and cooperate on many levels today, and we will continue to do that tomorrow.”
