SOFIA: The Nu Image/Millennium Films mega production The Expendables 3, which leading man Sylvester Stallone co-wrote, began shooting in Varna, the postcard-perfect Bulgarian Black Sea town, 19 August.

SOFIA: An ambitious new 12-part political thriller series about a fictional daily newspaper, Fourth Power, will finally air on pubcaster Bulgarian National Television in September, following its victory over real-life political intrigues. It will be the most significant original production since the The Ungiven, which recounted the rescue of 48,000 Bulgarian Jews from the death camps during World War II.

ZAGREB: Zvonimir Juric's social drama The Reaper (Kosac), set to begin production next in September, paints a portrait of struggle in a war-torn land. Produced by Ankica Juric Tilic and Kinorama in coproduction with Eva Rohrman and the Slovenian Forum Ljubljana, the project is expected to premiere in May 2014.

BRATISLAVA: Mátyás Prikler, director of the social drama Fine, Thanks, screened at the Rotterdam IFF this year, is prepping to produce the final segments of the episodic Twenty, a look at changes since the founding of an independent Slovakia in 1993. The project's original title, Slovakia 2.0, was dropped in the course of developing ten stories, each by a respected director, to chronicle the country's transitions.

ZAGREB: Igor Šeregi’s debut feature retraces the story of one of the greatest rivalries in soccer history, between the Bad Blue Boys, the supporters of  football club Dinamo, Zagreb, Croatia and Delije, the supporters of rival Red Star Belgrade, Serbia.

PRAGUE: Czech Oscar winner Jan Svěrák is in production on the music fairy tale Tři bratři  (Three Brothers), based on the script by his father, Zdeněk, who has incorporated music and texts from children's operettas he wrote with Jaroslav Uhlíř for the Czech National Theatre.

Miroslav Krobot's original script chronicling the pitfalls of love in a small Moravian town, Nowhere (Díra u Hanušovic), is filming in the Czech Republic's Jeseniky mountains, which form and shape the story, according to the director.

BUCHAREST: Răzvan Săvescu's debut feature is filming in Romania through 17 August and will then incorporate US locations in New York for 10 days.

PRAGUE: The two-month shoot in Prague and Brno of comedy Dedictví or Kurvaseneříka (The Heritage 2) has wrapped, following up on the film's first part

BUCHAREST: Nicolae Constantin Tănase's debut feature is a 100% independent production between Tudor Giurgiu's Libra Film (librafilm.net) and Radu Stancu's deFilm (defilm.ro), with premiere set for summer 2014. The film "will be the biggest surprise in 2014," says Giurgiu.

The creative team behind Walking Too Fast (Pouta) - director Radim Špaček, screenwriter Ondřej Štindl, DoP Jaromír Kačer and producer Vratislav Šlajer - have wrapped two months of shooting for coming-of-age film Places (Mista), the second in a planned trilogy examining the changing face of the contemporary Czech Republic.

Award-winning director Kostadin Bonev (Warming Up Yesterday's Lunch, 2002; Europolis-The Town of The Delta, 2009) is shooting his full length documentary Six Stories On A Romantic Execution about the life and death of Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov, one of Bulgaria’s most important poets.

BUCHAREST: Director and producer Tudor Giurgiu (Of Snails and Men) is developing together with photographer Cristian Movilă a feature based on the international art theft sensation last year that reached a tragic resolution in Romania.

BUCHAREST: Cristina Iacob's debut feature, a comedy road movie produced by MediaPro Pictures started filming on the Black Sea on 29 July and will continue in various seaside locations and in Bucharest until end of August.

Renowned for his original talent and unconventional style, Silver Bear-winning Bulgarian director Georgi Djulgerov (Advantage, 1977) is in postproduction on his 15th feature, Buffer Zone. The young company Front Film, run by the director’s ex-students, Nadejda Koseva and Svetla Tsotsorkova, was awarded with 472,430 EUR by the Bulgarian National Film Center (NFC) for the project.

ZAGREB: Aleš Suk and Željka  Sukova are in post-production on their "docu-fiction fairy tale," shot over three years and expected to complete in spring. Music by Midi Lidi, the Czech rockers from their previous films Marija´s Own and Winter/Miracle, is nearly set.