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THE COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF THE COUNTRIES ON THE BALKAN PENINSULA HAS ALLOWED THE REGION TO COMPETE WITH ITALY AS A FILMING DESTINATION AND THE CURRENT INFRASTRUCTURE ALLOWS FOR REAL CHOICE.
Image: Succession © HBO.
“Italy is a natural movie set. Rebates and financial support throughout the country are a valid reason to experience it, considering the high skilled professionals available here,” says Raffaellla Delvecchio, international production manager at Apulia Film Commission. Most recently Bari was used for a subplot of Michaela Coel’s celebrated series I May Destroy You but the country is equally as familiar with high-end tentpoles. Mission Impossible 7 and upcoming James Bond No Time to Die both carried out filming in the country. The hilltop town of Matera (pictured above) hosted the Bond shoot where, according to stunt director Lee Morrison, 8,400 gallons of Coca-Cola were poured on the cobbled streets to make them less slippery for a motorbike stunt. Mission Impossible 7 returned to Italy in October after being one of the first international productions halted by Covid-19 in March, just before a high octane sequence was due to shoot in Venice. Across the Adriatic, shoots that come to Croatia are often after its cost-effective locations. Many, such as HBO’s Succession (pictured below), are looking for the beautiful coast and islands but others are after flexible settings, some of which act as surprising doubles. The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard shot in multiple locations across the country with nearly 50 planned filming days in Croatia. Filming took place in the cities of Rovinj, Zagreb, Rijeka and Karlovac to double for both Italy and Croatia. Meanwhile Mamma Mia 2 doubled the island of Vis for a Greek island. AMC’s The Terror (pictured on next page) even employed VFX to turn the dry and barren landscape of the island of Pag into the Arctic’s northwest passage. The capital Zagreb has stood in for Riga, Berlin, Florence as well as Zagreb in recent Netflix comedy series Medical Police. Croatia has three distinct areas: the coastal region, which includes various islands from Istria in the north through Kvarner and down to Dalmatia in the south, a mountain region and the flat plains found in the continental region. Filming has always taken place throughout the country, but the most recent
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iteration of Croatia’s tax incentive adds a 5% uplift to productions that film in underdeveloped areas, which is set to encourage producers to explore even more of Croatia’s extensive locations. One of the productions to have recently qualified is “Any shoot tAking Netflix series Tribes of plAce in croAtiA, Europa. Set in 2070, montenegro And the post-apocalyptic sloveniA is within series is about three close reAch of young friends who set out to change the fate of lArge studios Europe after a global And equipment catastrophe fractures it in romAniA, into warring microstates. hungAry, serbiA There are a growing And bulgAriA.” number of regional film commissions that work in partnership with the national Film Office to facilitate productions. The Zadar Film Commission was the first to open in 2014, located to the South of Croatia followed by The Istria Film Commission on the north coast in 2015. The national capital Zagreb is the most recently established film office opening in 2019. To the south, Montenegro has also marketed itself as an open studio ready for productions to discover. “Being beautiful is a fact. Being small is our advantage,” says Sanja Jovanovic, programme policy manager at the Film Centre of Montenegro. This slogan captures “the easiness of transferring from the winter’s snowy peaks of the mountain Durmitor to the summer’s sandy beaches of Ulcinj, in only three hours’ drive. That is a Montenegrin thing. The fine Mediterranean climate, with a high amount of sunny days per year, makes Montenegrin natural locations an “open studio” that are easily accessible, and, in production terms, extremely practical,” she adds. In terms of locations, the remains of Roman, Medieval, Oriental, Venetian, Austro-Hungarian and Socialist eras are scattered everywhere in only 14,000 km2, which is why it is so easy for Montenegro to double for almost any other location,