SKOPJE: Director Slobodan Unkovski and playwright Goran Stefanovski are working on the second part of the cult TV series Bushava Azbuka, which was originally produced 33 years ago. The 1985 series, produced by the Macedonian Radio Television, was a 31-episode educational series for children about Macedonian literature, culture and tradition, through music and animation. It is the most successful product of MRT, with which many generations learned the alphabet.

SKOPJE: The Macedonian Film Agency will distribute nearly 2.5 M EUR to 24 projects, including 1,904,878 EUR / 117,150,000 MKD for the first round of 2018 production grants for feature, short, animation films and documentaries.

SKOPJE: The Macedonian distribution company Cutaway will introduce its first ever multiplatform day-and-date release in three Balkan countries (Croatia, Albania and Macedonia) on 3 May 2018. Films will be available for the first time in cinemas and on two Video on Demand platforms at once: Cinesquare.net and Pantaflix.

SKOPJE: The Macedonian/Serbian/Slovenian/Kosovan coproduction Year of the Monkey / Godina na majmunot by Vladimir Blazevski will have its world premiere at the opening of the 21st edition of the Skopje Film Festival, set to take place in Skopje from 19 to 26 April 2018. More than 50 films will be screened at the festival.

SKOPJE: Shorts TV bought the television rights for Macedonian short film Fighting for Death / Borba za smrt directed by Eleonora Veninova. The film will be available in Europe, Asia and North America.

SKOPJE: The Macedonian Film Agency announced the Women in the Film Industry strategy for the next five years, in order to raise the percentage of female authors. Only 21 percent of the films supported by the agency in the last 10 years are directed by women and they are mostly short films and documentaries.

SKOPJE: Martin Ivanov and Ivica Dimitrijevic are in the final stages of postproduction with Digging / Kopanje, a low-budget independent feature film based on the text by German playwright Christian Winkler. The film produced by MI Film will have its Macedonian release in Cinema Frosina in Skopje on 28 February 2018.

SKOPJE: Macedonian film production budget remained high in 2017 with an annual budget from the Macedonian Film Agency of around 6 m EUR.

SKOPJE: The Macedonian Film Agency granted 1.2 m EUR for Willow  / Vrba by the acclaimed Milcho Manchevski, who will come back to shoot in Macedonia after eight years. A total of 2,449,902 EUR / 151,375,000 MKD was distributed as production grants.

SKOPJE: A total of ten TV series were produced in 2017, which is an increase of 50% compared to 2016, when five series premiered on Macedonian national TV channels.