WARSAW: Israeli director and screenwriter Hagar Ben-Ashar has begun the process of casting young actors for her new drama The War Has Ended. Production is planned to begin in the spring of 2018.

TBILISI: Gigisha Abashidze is in postproduction with his debut feature Neighbors, set for release in autumn 2017. The film is the first Georgian/Macedonian coproduction.

BUCHAREST: Cristian Comeagă is in preproduction with the historical docu-drama series Romanians - The Story of a Nation / Românii – povestea unui neam, set to start shooting in June 2017.

PRESPA: Serbian actor and director Dragan Bjelogrić is in production with the TV series Shadows over the Balkans / Senke nad Balkanom, a three-season political thriller drama set in the 1930s in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Production started on 1 October 2016 in Serbia where 30 percent of the shooting was completed. Scenes from the TV series are currently shooting on locations in Prespa and Bitola surroundings.

PRAGUE: Karel Vachek, the head of the documentary department at FAMU and one of the most original Czech filmmakers known for his experimental, enormously lengthy film essays, is shooting the decades-leaping documentary Communism.

BUCHAREST: Acclaimed Romanian helmer Radu Jude is set to start shooting his new feature film Is This What You Were Born For? with his regular producer Ada Solomon at Hi Film Productions in summer 2017. This Romanian/Czech/French/Bulgarian coproduction will tackle a delicate subject in Romanian history, the massacre of approximately 20,000 Jewish people by the Romanian army in Odessa in 1941.

WARSAW: CANAL+ commissioned a second season of the crime series Teacher / Belfer starring Maciej Stuhr. TVN is the executive producer.

VILNIUS: A Lithuanian/German documentary coproduction Hello, Dear Granny!/ Liebe Oma, Guten Tag! directed by two sisters, Jūratė Samulionytė and Vilma Samulionytė, is in postproduction. The release is planned for November 2017.

ZAGREB: Acclaimed Croatian helmer Antonio Nuić is currently in the final stages of preproduction with his new feature film Mali / Mali je naš, the third part of a project he started as a student film. Shooting is scheduled to launch on 20 June 2017.

OHRID: Screenwriter and director Ilija Piperkoski is shooting his debut feature film Grandpa and Grandson, produced by Pandora`s box production, in cooperation with Dream Factory and Romania’s Alien film.

PRAGUE: Katarina Krnacova, one of the rising new generation of women shaping the film industry in Slovakia, is producing Summer with Bernard, a Slovak/German/Czech coproduction that will shoot in summer 2018.

PLZEN: Vaclav Kadrnka is working on the script of a film inspired by his personal family story, Saving One Who Was Dead / Zprava o Zachrane Mrtveho, with plans to go into production in 2018.

TBILISI: Dato Kiknavelidze is currently in development with Geno, the first Georgian long animated film. A 13 minutes short pilot of the film became the first Georgian animated film selected for the 2017 Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Market (MIFA) Competition programme.

VILNIUS: The prominent Lithuanian documentarian Audrius Stonys is in production with Baltic New Wave, working together with Latvian director Kristine Briede. Their new film about Baltic documentary filmmakers from the Soviet times was chosen as one of the winners at Meeting Point - Vilnius industry screenings. It will be shown at Cannes industry screenings this May.

BRATISLAVA: Acclaimed Slovak director Martin Šulík is shooting his new feature The Interpreter / Tlmočník. It is his first feature film after a long break following Gypsy / Cigán (produced by Titanic, In Film, and coproduced by Czech Television, RTVS) in 2011. The road movie will star Oscar-winning director Jiří Menzel and Toni Erdmann actor Peter Simonischek.

SOFIA: Ilian Djevelekov is in postproduction with his second feature film Omnipresent. The release is planned for October 2017.