The hottest and fastest-moving item on the recent Czech audio-visual slate has turned out to be an animation with a long tradition and deep roots in the country. Tajikistan-born FAMU student Daria Kashcheeva's innovative and touching short animated drama Daughter (2019) went on a globe-trotting award-winning frenzy, including winning a student Oscar and landing a nomination for the coveted Oscar for Best Animated Short, which brought the country into the limelight worldwide.

The Czech Republic received further international acclaim as a producer of animated films thanks to the directing duo of Dávid Štumpf and Michala Mihályi and their thoughtful and slightly absurd spin on the well-known tale of Noah´s Ark in the tongue-in-cheek fable SH_T HAPPENS (2019). Meanwhile, a magical stop-motion short film by Martin Smatana, The Kite (2019), explored the delicate topic of mortality for a children's audience in a sensitive but captivating manner. The latter two award-garlanded shorts have a common denominator, the Slovak-born, Prague-based producer Peter Badač.

Young and restless

Hailing from the younger generation of progressive domestic producers, Badač acquired an outside-the-box mindscape and an innovative approach to film production. Both these attributes were embodied by the young and ambitious Czech production company nutprodukce, which he co-founded with two like-minded emerging producers, Pavla Janoušková Kubečková and Tomáš Hrubý, in 2009. The company grew rapidly and scaled up its projects, becoming a regular fixture in the Czech film industry.

Badač has been involved with animated film since early in his career, but he first won major international acclaim with Pandas (2013) by the young director Matúš Vizár. This animated sci-fi short packaged biting satire in a stylish pop animation. At that time, Badač was already pursuing projects as a solo producer through his own company BFILM, which he founded in 2010, and Pandas arose from a seamless collaboration between his new production outfit and nutprodukce.

This short has been a success at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, and also in Cannes, where Pandas netted an accolade at the Cinéfondation sidebar. The producer's involvement with auteur animated shorts has been sheer coincidence. "It was a time when there were a lot of talented animators without producers," says Badač.

The emerging company BFILM built on this initial success and its further projects also garnered prizes and travelled the international circuit. The animated short Nina (2014) combined the classic paper-based model of stop-motion animation with the animation of objects in a rolling cylinder. Meanwhile, Stability (2015) was brought to life by chalk-drawing on a blackboard, and an artistic experiment merging an animated diary with a personal documentary, on pregnancy, by Joanna Kożuch and Boris Šima, brought about 39 weeks, 6 days (2017).

Remaining loyal to former colleagues from nutprodukce, the two similarly attuned companies worked together on Gottland (2014), a documentary anthology made by up-and-coming Czech and Slovak directors. The project was inspired by Mariusz Szczygieł's book of the same title, which depicts the Czech Republic as a country of horror, sadness, and grotesque.

Scaling up through innovation and agility

Even though Peter Badač´s career revolved largely around animated projects, this versatile producer and his portfolio of works resist simplistic pigeonholing. Badač cherishes flexibility and freedom and he points out in the same breath that every project needs to possess two crucial attributes: a stimulating topic and audience interest.

His devotion and agility as a producer enable him to consistently push the envelope and come up with original works and innovative approaches. His three major current projects demonstrate the ethos that BFILM embodies.

One of these is My Sunny Maad (2021), directed by accomplished animator Michaela Pavlátová and based on Freshta, a book by Petra Procházková, a Czech investigative journalist and war reporter. The film is an ambitious animated epic for an adult audience, being a hard-hitting portrayal of Afghan women’s struggle for emancipation during the post-Taliban period. The project employs a team of 30 animators from the three co-producing countries, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and France.

The film's producer, Petr Oukropec of the Czech outfit Negativ, pitched the film as “a family story, like Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, but set in Kabul; a love story like Gone with the Wind but set in Kabul; with a strong heroine like Persepolis but located in Kabul; a political drama like Waltz with Bashir but set in Kabul”. Incidentally, My Sunny Maad is not the only project connecting Negativ and Badač. He also produces Oukropec´s feature-length directorial effort Martin and the Forest Secret (2021), a family summer camp adventure that sparkles with VFX.

Animation remains a constant presence in Badač´s professional life but his focus as a producer has recently shifted to transmedia storytelling and cross-platform projects, which he is excited to introduce and propel into the domestic milieu. Among the first transmedia projects will be an ambitious big-budget adventure feature film in 3D animation, Heart of a Tower (2021), a co-production between the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Belgium. As with The Kite, Badač does not want Heart of a Tower to be only a visually attractive product but also a meaningful one. The story will thus show children how difficult situations in life can be confronted and eventually overcome.

The film, supported by the Czech Film Fund with € 604,000, will make use of new animation technology and the game engine Unity, normally used for video games and short films. Heart of a Tower will therefore become one of the first feature films to be made deploying this technology. Furthermore, Unity will be also utilized for a new mobile game that will be a tie-in to the animated feature. The technological boundary-pushing and the enhancement of the film´s “added value” won´t stop with the game. Truly embracing the transmedia experience, Badač ventures onto yet another platform, one which he is rather passionate about. Heart of a Tower's prequel, Letter From The Heart, will be released as a proper VR experience, the development of which has already received support from the Czech Film Fund to the tune of € 25,000.

The owner of BFILM is investing just as much innovative thinking and experimental methodology into another multi-platform package, Once There Was…, envisioned as a six-part arthouse docu-animated cycle. The first episode, Once There Was a Sea (2021), presents a mosaic of true stories from the inhabitants of Muynak, who are threatened by the drying up of the Aral Sea. The pilot directed by Joanna Kożuch is currently being finalized and will spearhead the entire anthology, focusing as it does on things that are vanishing.

The following episode will examine Pripyat, the Ukrainian city, doomed forever to bear the stigma of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Czech and French directors have already been tapped for upcoming episodes, as the project is supported by Creative Europe MEDIA, and French and Polish producers are involved in the project alongside their Czech and Slovak counterparts. The topics will reach beyond the film frame to deliver a multidimensional experience in the form of an internet diary, a travelogue including local testimonials, and graphic novels.

The full producer package

BFILM has a firm foothold in the international environment, nimbly navigating the European film industry in search of proficient partners to enhance projects and provide the “added value” envisioned by Badač. The producer has been confidently straddling the Czech Republic and Slovakia since early on in his career, though he started running a proper federative operation only in 2017 when he officially set-up a Czech offshoot, BFILM.cz, in Prague in addition to the already well-established operation in Slovakia.

The work that preceded the BFILM´s double dose of production duties was a debut by another emerging Slovak filmmaker based in Prague, Tereza Nvotová. Her first feature-length outing, Filthy (2017), a co-production between BFILM and Czech production company moloko film, adopts a lens that defies the stereotypical perception of a sex abuse survivor and empowers her to not only to confront the perpetrator but to stop living like a victim.

The intimate psychological coming-of-age drama managed to draw a surprising number of theatre-goers and became the most successful Slovak minority co-production to be released in Slovak cinemas in 2017, partly thanks to effective marketing efforts in which Badač remains actively involved.

"My work does not end with the final cut," says Badač as he explains that he is actively engaged with each project throughout the entire chain of the production process, from early development up to marketing and distribution. "If somebody is looking for a producer to do just the paperwork, we are most unlikely to be a good match," he points out.

Badač is currently co-producing Nvotová´s eagerly awaited follow-up project, Nightsiren (2021), a drama with elements of horror and magical realism, partnering with Filthy´s co-producer, the Czech company moloko film. In her new film, Nvotová plans to address fear and superstition which she claims go “hand in hand with misogyny and racism”, and to continue subverting conventions through female empowerment, just as she did in her feature debut.

Even though the Czech Republic and Slovakia are working together on BFILM´s multiple projects, Badač explains he did not set up two separate companies to partner on the same projects. "I have a nose for which projects are better for which country, as their markets have their differences,” he notes. He prefers each of his companies to be engaged in different works with different partners, thus diversifying BFILM's overall portfolio, brand(s) and experiences.

The Slovak arm recently coproduced the German drama Freedom (2017), which premiered in Locarno, while the Czech company is readying Backwoods (2023) by Czech editor-turned-director Evženie Brabcová. Brabcová´s first feature-length outing as director will be a phantasmagorical film about family, wild hogs and the end of the world in an atmosphere of existential grotesquerie, which has been recently recognized as the best as yet unrealized script of 2020 by the Czech Film Foundation.

More than meets the eye

The hidden side of BFILM is its slate of producer-driven projects. From the producer´s perspective, Badač likes the idea of importing successful foreign formats and tweaking them to appeal to domestic audiences. With this in mind, he has entered into discussions with Brazilian and Spanish production companies, picking several titles from their catalogues for a possible domestic make-over.

Furthermore, there are already several local sleeper projects in the BFILM pipeline. Among these is Magda H., a biopic drama about the first wife of the president of Czechoslovakia, a film in development that Badač has called “a Czechoslovak Mildred Pierce”. The producer is also looking for the right director and television channel for a relationship sitcom, The Right One.

Meanwhile, the road-series American Dream, about the wave of nineteenth-century immigration from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the burgeoning capitalism of the USA, is under preparation. Polish filmmaker Piotr Domalewski is tapped to helm the miniseries that is currently the subject of discussions with the streaming giant Netflix.

Even though BFILM is progressively shifting its focus to live-action production, Badač won´t be turning his back on animation entirely. He managed to tap the award-garlanded director of Daughter, Daria Khascheeva, to come on board a puppet television series I Want To Know!, which is a spin-off from Martin Smatana´s award-winning The Kite. Currently in the early stages of development, this children's series aims to tackle complicated social and personal issues in as clear, sensitive and visually alluring manner as did the acclaimed original short.

Undeterred by the havoc that COVID-19 continues to wreak on the global audio-visual industry, Badač is continuing talks with major players, such as HBO and Netflix, for potential partnerships. Furthermore, he is also bracing himself for a busy year in 2021, when he will be launching a world-premiere quartet of BFILM projects and shepherding them into wider distribution.