FNE spoke with MIDPOINT Managing Director Barbora Struss and with Katarina Tomkova, who recently joined the team as Project Manager for MIDPOINT TV Launch.

“MIDPOINT TV Launch focuses on high-end TV series writing, teaching US and European TV structure to post-Soviet scriptwriters”, Katarina Tomkova told FNE. This year’s TV series workshop consists of 17 participants with seven projects form the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Serbia and Romania. “The TV spectrum is very diverse,” Tomkova said, and for the first time Czech TV, Slovak TV and HBO are meeting with participants.

“HBO will grant a financial award for the best TV series project from their programming territories for the first time”, Tomkova also told FNE. The award of 4,000 USD will be given out in November 2016 in Slovakia.

“We now have a portfolio of workshops, with eight scheduled in 2016 and we plan to add another workshop in 2017”, Barbora Struss told FNE. One of the 2017 workshops will be held in Macedonia, the first time MIDPOINT is offering a workshop in that country. The growth of MIDPOINT makes it the biggest development workshop in the CEE region, with TV offering the biggest area for growth.

MIDPOINT, which was initiated at FAMU film school as a collaboration between several CEE film schools to help their graduating students transition to a professional career, is now focusing on first and second feature films, along with professional short films.

Struss noted that with the expansion of MIDPOINT, it is now seeing returning participants who started out in one workshop and are returning to take advantage of its other workshops. Struss said that in six years MIDPOINT has had some 600 participants, with ten of their feature films going into distribution.