Ilie Nastase, the legendary bad boy of international tennis, famous for his tantrums, erratic behaviour and use of obscenities, as well as for his brilliance on courts, is the subject of Romanian director Tudor Giurgiu’s new film, Nasty – More Than Just Tennis.
HBO Max exec Hanka Kastelicová has revealed that this is one of several docs HBO will be serving up in 2024.
“It’s a film covering not only Nasty’s life and all his problems which we still remember but we [also] see his life and his connections to Romania,” Kastelicová said of the documentary which includes appearances from Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe and many of the other tennis greats of the era.
The film is among the first HBO titles set to premiere on the new Max streaming service across Europe in the spring of 2024.
“We keep the content we have on our platform now but we add a lot of content from Discovery+. Also, we have CNN and Eurosport now so some of this content will be on the platform,” Kastelicová explains of the new venture (whose exact launch date is yet to be confirmed).
Speaking to Business Doc Europe, Kastelicová, VP Documentaries for EMEA, also talked up other titles she expects to make a big impact either on Max or on the festival circuit in 2024.
On the Polish front, Agnieszka Zwiefka’s Vika, a crowd-pleasing doc about one of Poland’s oldest DJs, will soon arrive on the platform following its successful festival run.
Kastelicová confirms that HBO has boarded the same director’s new doc Silent Trees (a working title for a project pitched as Runa last August in Docu Talents from the East in Sarajevo). This is about a teenage Iraqi Kurdish girl who holds her family together after her mother dies in a refugee camp on the border of Belarus.
HBO previously supported Zwiefka’s Queen Of Silence (2014), about a deaf gypsy girl who copes with the harshness of her surroundings by escaping into Bollywood movies and music. “She (Zwiefka) is one of the most important authors in central European cinema. It’s a pleasure to collaborate with her on multiple films,” Kastelicová comments of the prolific director.
Another HBO Polish title which has been striking a chord with audiences is Jakub Piatek’s Pianoforte (about the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw). “We were very keen to have this film because first of all it addresses the young audiences – the protagonists are very young. Secondly, in Poland which is one of our main territories, the Chopin competition happens only every five years and it’s a big event,” she says of the film, expected to be available to HBO subscribers from March onwards.
Among new HBO titles likely to create strong interest and debate is Danish-Bosnian ecological tale The Sky Above Zenica from directors Nanna Frank Møller and Zlatko Pranjič. This is about eco-activists taking on a big industrial polluter.
Under Kastelicová’s guidance, the streaming giant (part of the Warner Bros. Discovery family) has enjoyed several recent hits. There have been docs from Romania (Daniel Bărnuți and Alexandra Bărnuți’s My Muslim Husband), Bulgaria (Nikolay Stefanov’s football hooligan doc No Place for You in Our Town), the Czech Republic (Soňa G Lutherová’s transgender story A Happy Man) and Poland (Hanka Nobis’s Polish Prayers, Joanna Ratajczak’s Trust Me, about open relationships, and Lea Glob’s multi award-winning Danish/Polish co-pro Apolonia, Apolonia). These all follow on from Alexander Nanau’s Oscar-nominated Collective (Romainia, 2019), a huge success for HBO.
Volia Chajkouskaya’s Not Made for Politics (the working title for a project previously known as Wife Of) is now picture-locked. This doc, which has been shrouded in secrecy, is about the wives of Belarusian dissidents who are in prison. One of the wives featured is Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the opposition leader-in-exile whose husband, activist Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains behind bars in Belarus.
Generally, Kastelicová and her team focus on supporting docs from the main countries where they are broadcasting (notably Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria). However, Kastelicová felt it was important to get behind an essential Belarus doc like Not Made for Politics. “In ex-communist countries, we very often forget how fragile a thing democracy is. With this film, we want to remind [viewers] a little bit about the importance of the constant work for democracy.”
The anti-democratic trend isn’t just apparent in everyday politics but in film financing as well. In certain countries in which HBO is active, national film funders are increasingly reluctant to support projects from filmmakers with radical political or social perspectives. HBO is therefore sometimes stepping into the breach.
“We feel it is extremely important to give voices [to artists] and to let the audience know [about] the members of these communities,” the HBO exec explains why she is getting behind movies like the transgender story A Happy Man. “We want to support under-represented groups and we also want to support under-represented voices.”
Kastelicová argues that it may be worth creating “special funding” on a European level for filmmakers who are frozen out by their own national funding bodies.
HBO Europe doesn’t just support films directly. The company also provides prizes at festivals, for instance the HBO Max award at the Sarajevo Film Festival, and its prizes at DocsBarcelona and at East Doc Platform.
“As a former director, I remember very well that when you are on the journey developing your project, you need some kind of support. It is not so much about the money as the recognition,” she says of these cash prizes (which also draw attention to the HBO brand).
Kastelicová relishes working with first-time directors (“they have this feeling they want to do something big and special and unique”) but will continue to support established talents.
For many years, she collaborated closely with the widely respected London-based exec Antony Root, formerly Executive Vice President of Original Programming and Production, who gave consistently strong backing. “I have a new boss, Jamie Cooke [general manager, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Baltics, Middle East, Mediterranean and Turkey] who also speaks about the importance of documentary films. I would say that since Antony retired, I’ve had great support.”
In spite of the corporate changes around her, Kastelicová’s mission remains the same as it always has been, namely to “bring the best Eastern European stories to cinemas and to our platform.”
The HBO exec confides that every year she tells herself the slate looks so strong that she worries that it will be impossible ever to trump – but then more equally exceptional new docs begin to be commissioned. “Since 2014, we have had six nominations for the European Film Awards…we often focus on what should be bigger and what should better but when we look back it’s incredible,” she notes of just how HBO has turbo-charged the Eastern European doc sector over the last decade.
