NATPE Europe Shines a Light on Polish Programming

PRAGUE: This afternoon in Prague, NATPE Europe held its first-ever Celebration of Polish TV Programming event, honoring Piotr Korycki, a member of the board of TVN; Andrzej Muszynski, the president of ATM Group; and Urszula Piasecka, sales director at Monolith Films, along with the celebrated filmmaker Agnieszka Holland.

Rod Perth, the president and CEO of NATPE, said that the selection of Poland as the first country to honor was a direct response from what he had been hearing in the marketplace. “We are paying tribute to, for the first time, a country that we think is overdue in terms of deserving tribute,” he said. “There’s an enormous amount of great programming being developed [in Poland] that we think deserves to be seen.”

Perth then presented individual awards to TVN, a Polish commercial network that houses three free-to-air channels and seven thematic offerings; ATM Group, which is one of Poland’s largest independent production companies; and Monolith Films, an independent film distributor, producer and sales agent.

ATM Group's Muszynski told the audience that there is “a lot going on in Poland right now!” He added, “We are a pretty large market, and after a long period of adapting foreign formats, broadcasters are now concentrating much bigger interest on creating our own products.”

He said that doing adaptations of international formats was a great learning experience for the Polish TV market about what they can do in terms of local productions. “I believe that we have grown up to be able to come up with our own local ideas now,” he noted. “They sell much better than the foreign adaptation. They tell our stories. For the first time ever, a lot of productions from Eastern Europe are now going to be distributed worldwide. This is a significant change.”

Muszynski explained that Poland had previously exported some formats that were adapted in certain markets, “but still the scale wasn’t really amazing. I’m not sure whether everybody trusted that [these ideas] could travel far away from the Eastern Bloc. I believe now it is changing.” He quipped, “Scandinavians had their five minutes, which they used pretty well, and now we have to push them out a bit.”

TVN's Korycki spoke about the healthy economy in Poland and what this means for its television productions. “Poland was the only country [in Europe] to survive the crisis of 2008-09,” he said. “There was still growth in GDP; the TV market suffered a little bit, but we are a nation of 40 million, which is one of the biggest European nations. That translates to sizable value of the TV ad market in money terms, and that’s very helpful. This is really supporting TV production in Poland. Being based on 40 million inhabitants in our country, we can spend much more on episodes per hour than smaller countries, so that’s a big benefit for Poland.”

The Celebration of Polish TV Programming luncheon was followed by a Q&A with Holland, an accomplished film and TV director and screenwriter. Holland has a long list of credits that include Burning Bush for HBO Europe, along with work on TV series such as The Killing, The Wire, Treme and upcoming episodes of House of Cards.