A year into her new role as fiction development director at United Media, overseeing an impressive eight territories, Nataša Buljan is look in to stretch the  range of projects it creates and find ones that can travel – but always with an eye on quality. It’s a year since Nataša Buljan was appointed fiction development director at United Media, the leading media company in South-east Europe. In an interview with C21, she described the role in one word – “amazing.”

But, for someone who was once heading for academia, Buljan’s career trajectory has, she admits, been by accident rather than design. “I got approached in a bookshop by a lady who used to run Saachi & Saachi for the whole of [the former] Yugoslavia. To cut a long story short, I became first a copywriter and then creative director for advertising agencies. Hated every minute of it… and stayed for 15 years!”

With plans always to leave, Buljan eventually got invited to work as a scriptwriter in TV. It was at Croatia’s Nova TV, one of the most watched TV networks in United Media’s portfolio of 55 channels, where the scriptwriter led her first content development department, and where she created the hit TV drama series Stella and telenovela The Pure Love. Her other credits include the critically acclaimed crime drama series Rest in Peace for Croatian National Television and telenovela The Real Woman for RTL Croatia.

A natural promotion for the Zagreb-based exec, who most recently headed fiction development for United Media’s Adriatic region, Buljan’s remit is sizeable. It covers no fewer than eight territories – Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Greece – and around 40 million people, although Buljan characteristically downplays this aspect. “It’s the same job, just a little bit bigger,” she says, noting Greece and Bulgaria are the two new territories she is now responsible for. “You get to meet all the best creatives in the region, and you really expose yourself to a great number of very interesting ideas. It’s creatively and professionally really rewarding,” says Buljan, adding: “And I think they had to give me this job because someone else must do Excel sheets. I’m not very good at that!”

Joking aside, however, the role is not without its pressures or challenges. For one, there’s the strategic shift in fiction development Buljan is now spearheading at United Media: “There’s a certain way things were done up to now. There are good reasons for it. Some practices were just more practical because [different] markets had a specific type of demand,” Buljan notes.

 “We are now trying to stretch that, open to very different projects; we have this scope, from light comedy and long-running series to ambitious historic dramas to contemporary crime to very ambitious – almost philosophical – projects.”

Buljan won’t be drawn on content still in early development, but the appointment of Tatjana Pavlović just over three years ago as director of original content sales and coproduction at United Media has played a part in this shift. “We work very closely on each project that we develop,” says Buljan of the relationship with Pavlović.

As such, coproductions and projects that have an international appeal are very much on the table. An example is United Media’s most expensive drama project to date, Me: Pink Panther, created by Serbian actor, director and producer Dragan Bjelogrlić and based on the novel of the same name by Olivera Ćirković, a former member of the Yugoslav national basketball team, who became part of the international criminal group ‘Pink Panther.’ The project that is still in development is a rare coproduction between Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria.

“We are constantly encouraged to work within the group with each other more. We are doing several projects with different countries involved and we are open to coproductions outside of the group, international coproductions. We don’t have set limits, but we are committed to get the best possible projects, to challenge ourselves and to grow the quality and the reach,” comments Buljan.

United Media has already tasted international success, including 2019’s The Devil’s Throat, produced by United Media’s Nova TV in Bulgaria, and 2022’s award-winning Serbian series Awake (2021), and last year launched crime dramas, The Demon’s Fall, the Bulgarian sequel to The Devil’s Throat, and the Greek detective series, Skarab, for international distribution.

Away from the crime genre, United Media’s six-part drama series, Marija, currently in preproduction and shortlisted for the C21Digital Drama Pitch 2024, is another project that has the ingredients to be an international coproduction, suggests Buljan, as could the winner of United Media’s inaugural Make the Scene! Pitch competition held last summer. Launched in partnership with the Pula Film Festival in Croatia, the €10,000 prize competition and workshop shortlisted six projects from across the region, the winner of which was Dert,written by Katarina Krstić. A modern Roma fairytale drama about love and redemption, set in Serbia, the story centres on Ahmed, a father, who after being released from prison, tries to regain the trust of his wife and children through Roma tradition and music, including building a traditional Roma tavern, called a Dert. The project is now in development at United Media.

Buljan, who was one of the judges, says what attracted her to the script was its exploration of “interesting characters that are at the margins of society,” but without exploiting them. “They’re treated like real characters.” she says, adding the story is “full of life” with “lots of amazing music.”

Could Dert travel? “I’m positive it could because it’s a universal story – from zero to hero,”says Buljan, noting also the popularity of Balkan Gypsy folk music in the region and beyond. “Even if you don’t understand it, it’s intoxicating. It’s truly powerful music. It’s not just something that you hear and forget.”

Dert certainly offers something in a different vein to most scripts that cross Buljan’s desk: “They are often amazing stories, but I read a lot of them, mostly crime stories and with some sort of combination of crime and the recent history of this part of the world. That’s the most popular, I would say, but I also often read contemporary stories that are based on true events, some sort of big social event or trial.”

An example of this is Marija, a true story about a young woman, happily married with two sons, who finds her world shattered when her boss, the mayor of a small town in Serbia, sexually assaults her and threatens to ruin her and her family if she speaks out. Looking ahead, Buljan says there are plans for a second Make the Scene! competition this year and the exec says this time around she is looking at expanding the scope of entries to further afield. “We limited it to Southeast Europe because it was the first one, so we didn’t know what to expect and we were afraid that we will get swamped. We did a little bit, but we managed. We were very prepared,” she says.

As for the challenges, Buljan concedes they are numerous – not least the war in Ukraine – but in her sphere of influence, it always comes down to one thing: the quality of the content. “You can have all the money in the world, you know, and no wars (which I hope, I really pray for all of us that this happens), and trends that peak and then decline, but it always comes down to the content,” the exec states, describing “quality content” as “good content that will overcome technical challenges and financial challenges and travel to become a great project.”