Abstract
Building an audience is currently the most challenging task for national film industries in Europe. This article scrutinizes this challenge by focusing on a specific European region - the post-Yugo-slav one.
Following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a large joint film market which regularly pro-duced highly successful films was replaced by seven national cinemas. In industry terms, these cinemas operate in a very different context from that of the former Yugoslavia, including no integrative film policy, fragmented territories and audiences.
Yet a number of post-Yugoslav films have managed to reach a significant national and/or regional audience. Relying on the concepts of low-brow, middle-brow, high-brow cinema and the ideal European co-production, and using data from the LumierePro database and national film centers, we map out films that achieved success domestically and those that managed to traverse national borders, in or-der to understand what attracts domestic, regional and (occasionally) international audiences.
We also identify the main obstacles to a better box-office of post-Yugoslav films and discuss possible policy steps to remedy them. For this, we analyze film texts, production processes, as well as obser-vational data from two industry events.
Our analysis paints a complex picture. While audiences across the region do differ, some the-matic and style preferences are shared - a situation that can be harnessed through the development of quality regional ideal European co-productions.
But new distribution strategies are needed, together with more scholarly efforts to understand the audiences and their engagement.