BRATISLAVA: The retro family story Hostage is shooting its first segments following a year's delay in what was originally planned as a winter 2012 production. Location work runs through 7 September near Bratislava, employing sites in Borinka, Záhorská Ves and Sandberg.

WARSAW: The director of comedy Being Like Deyna is prepping her first feature drama, All the Animals with You, based on a book of the same title by a Serbian author Boba Blagojević.

PRAGUE: Petr Vachler, founder of the Czech Lions awards, has begun shooting his second film –  feature length documentary The Meaning and Mystery of Life (Tajemství a smysl života), in which he combines elements of animation, drama, documentary, fantasy and mystery.

BUCHAREST: Following up on the acclaimed The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, Andrei Ujica is working on a new non-fiction film, tentatively called Tomorrow Never Knows, exploring the weekend 13-15 August 1965, which the Beatles spent in New York on the eve of their second US tour.

WARSAW: Diplodocus, an animated film based on a legendary Polish comic, has won an 80,000 EUR development grant from Media.

CRACOW: Marcin Krzyształowicz has launched the shoot for his new project, Kindergarten Lady (Pani z przedszkola), described as a Woody Allen-inspired tragicomedy about love and psychoanalysis with an intellectual tone. Lensing began 27 September.

TALLINN: Katrin Maimik’s coming-of-age debut film Cherry Tobacco (Kirsitubakas), written by Andres Maimik, is shooting in Estonian locations through October. It builds on the latter's previous hit comedy Kormoranid. Tobacco is produced by Kuukulgur Film, which previously released Daisy Petal Game II (Karikakramäng II), a shorts omnibus including films by the duo.

BUDAPEST: Ferenc Török (Istambul, Overnight, Moscow Square) starts his six-week romantic comedy shoot for Nobody's Island 27 August, mostly in Budapest with some seaside locations.

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.