There was a time when a new film or television series from the former Yugoslavia could become much more than entertainment. It could become a regional cultural event. Characters, catchphrases and scenes travelled effortlessly across borders, while actors were recognised from Ljubljana to Skopje and from Sarajevo to Belgrade. Today, that kind of shared screen culture feels increasingly rare.
This does not necessarily mean that the Western Balkans cinema is dying. There are still successful productions, and films such as Montevideo and the more recent The Wedding (Svadba) have shown that regional audiences will turn out for a local story when one manages to capture their attention. But compared with the cultural impact of productions from the 1980s, 1990s and even the early 2000s, there is a noticeable sense that something has been lost.
Part of the problem may be that audiences have simply changed. Instead of waiting for a new series to appear on television at a fixed time, viewers can now choose from thousands of productions on Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video and Disney+. Netflix, for example, is available across the region and offers an enormous catalogue that can be watched whenever and wherever viewers choose. Why wait until 8 p.m. for a new regional series when a teenager can open Netflix and immediately find an entire season of an American, British, Korean or Spanish production?
The problem becomes even more visible when looking at teenagers and pre-teens. There is plenty of content for young children across the region, but considerably less locally produced fiction aimed specifically at viewers roughly between 11 and 18. The result is that an entire generation can grow up knowing the characters of global streaming hits far better than the actors, directors and stories being produced just a few hundred kilometres away.
And perhaps this is where the industry faces its biggest challenge: not simply producing more content, but producing content that gives young people a reason to care about their own region. The irony is that the region still shares an enormous cultural and linguistic space. A Croatian series can be understood in Serbia, while a Serbian actor can work in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Slovenian and Montenegrin productions can travel much more easily than productions from countries separated by completely different languages.
Streaming may actually make that opportunity even greater. Regional productions are already reaching audiences beyond their home countries through global platforms — Netflix, for example, currently carries Croatian-language films such as Južina.
There is also the question of talent. For generations, acting, directing and screenwriting were prestigious career paths, and some of the biggest names in the region became household names. Today, young actors and filmmakers have a much larger world to look towards. For some, the ultimate ambition is no longer to become the biggest actor in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo or Ljubljana, but to make it to London or Los Angeles and pursue the global version of the American dream.
Television itself has changed, too. Traditional broadcasters no longer have the same cultural power they once did. The nightly family ritual of sitting down to watch the same programme has largely disappeared, replaced by personalised streaming libraries and algorithms.
Of course, there are financial realities, production costs, distribution problems and copyright issues. And nostalgia can make the past look better than it really was. Not everything produced decades ago was a masterpiece, and today’s audiences have far more choice than previous generations ever did.
Cinema and television once helped create a sense of cultural connection across borders that politics often struggled to maintain. Today, they could do something similar again — only this time, the audience is not waiting for a single television channel to tell them what to watch.
