Slawomir Cyra

World Screen Weekly, June 26, 2008

Deputy Director, Program Acquisitions and Sales, International Affairs

Telewizja Polska

Telewizja Polska (TVP), Poland’s sole public broadcaster, aims to serve the interests of viewers with content that reflects the country’s culture and history. Through its international unit, the company has been selling its original programming on the worldwide market for a number of years now. Today, Slawomir Cyra is leading the drive to increase TVP’s international presence, and the company has made gains both in the region and elsewhere around the world.

The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary are all key markets within Central and Eastern Europe, Cyra says. TVP fare has also picked up interest in Scandinavia and, more recently, Greece, Germany and the Asia-Pacific markets.

Cyra notes that buyers are beginning to recognize the level of quality of content coming out of Poland, with a healthy ad market allowing broadcasters to invest more in original content. Challenges, however, do exist. “If only all the buyers from TV stations in Europe could abandon the prejudice against anything which is not in the English language, they could discover there is a lot of similar quality programming, with high budgets and great actors and directors” coming out of the Polish market, he says.

And having a high-profile release certainly helps to cut through some of that prejudice. TVP had that this year with Katyn, the newest feature film from the award-winning filmmaker Andrzej Wajda. The feature was nominated as Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards this year, and recently screened at the Berlin Film Festival. Cyra lists the family series The Magic Tree, the wildlife documentary The Saga of an Ancient Forest, the preschool animation Fantazy the Bear and the World War II drama The Secret of the Cypher Tower as other top performers in the TVP catalogue.

Cyra has spent his entire career at TVP, joining the broadcaster’s news agency as a researcher in 1993 with aspirations of being a reporter. “After three years there I changed my mind and moved to international acquisitions,” he says. Since then, his remit has broadened over the years, and today also includes, in addition to domestic and international sales, film and sports acquisitions for all eight TVP channels. Cyra is enjoying the diverse responsibilities involved in his role and keeping up with the rapid changes taking place in the marketplace. And he is looking forward to tackling the challenges ahead for TVP, which is facing possible cutbacks in its license fee revenues. “As a company we will have to adjust. My goals are to further increase sales—as we [have done] year by year for some time—and do some really good acquisitions, to help our channels maintain their position in the market.”

—By Mansha Daswani