WROCŁAW: Polish box office hit director Patryk Vega is working on his new crime thriller entitled Plagues of Breslau and has announced that he has purchased rights to the Pitbull franchise with plans to release the new part in November 2021.

KOSICE: Slovak producer Livia Filusova of Furia Film, currently serving on the main jury of Art Film Fest (running through 23 June 2018), is on board the Czech/Slovak/Irish film Charlatan, which will begin filming in winter 2018, directed by Agnieszka Holland from a script by Marek Epstein.

LJUBLJANA: Slovenian production company Invida is producing a 13-episode animated series for Slovenia’s public TV RTV SLO, How It Grows.

LJUBLJANA: Italian-born Slovenian director Martin Turk began shooting his third feature film Don't Forget to Breathe / Ne pozabi dihati on 19 June 2018. The coming-of-age drama is produced by an all-female Slovenian/Croatian/Italian coproduction team.

VILNIUS: American Film Institute graduate Tomas Vengris, the son of Lithuanian immigrants living in the US, has begun postproduction on his debut feature Motherland / Gimtinė.

PRAGUE: Slovak producer Juraj Krasnohorsky of Artichoke and Czech producer Martin Vandas of Maur Film are coproducing the animated film Of Unwanted Things and People along with Slovenia’s ZVVIKS and Poland’s WJTeam/Likaon.

PRAGUE: Director Ondrej Pecha is developing the animated film Jack Russell the Planet Rescuer with Bio Illusion producer Miroslav Smidmajer.

BELGRADE: The mix-genre rom-com/road movie Taxi Blues / Taksi Bluz commenced its principal shooting at the end of May. The film will mark the feature debut for the director, Miroslav Stamatov. Taxi Blues was granted 20 million dinars (170,000 EUR) from Film Center Serbia’s call for commercial film projects.

WARSAW: Jan Komasa is working on his new drama Corpus Christi, a Script Pro winning project about a convict posing as a priest.

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.