HBO Europe Orders Series From 'No Man's Land' Director Danis Tanovic

Created and co-written by Marjan Alcevski, 'Success' follows four strangers in Zagreb bound together by a violent event.

HBO Europe has given the green light to an original series from Danis Tanovic, the director of Oscar-winner No Man's Land.

A six-part drama set in modern-day Zagreb, Success was created and written by Marjan Alcevski, and was selected as one of the winning projects at HBO Adria First Draft Contest, an open call for original works from the Adria region, the nations of the former Yugoslavia that stretch along the north-east coast of the Adriatic Sea.

The plot of Success follows four strangers who are bound together irrevocably by a violent event. Each, in their own way, moves to take control of their lives as the consequences of their actions threaten to catch up with them. HBO Europe describes the series as “a bitter ode to the city of Zagreb.”

Success will be Tanovic's first drama series for television. The director, who won the best foreign-language film Oscar for his 2001 debut, No Man's Land, managed a similarly multiple plotline structure in his last feature, Death in Sarajevo, which won the Grand Jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2016. His 2013 drama An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, also won Berlin's Grand Jury honor, as well as the festival's best actor prize for Nazif Mujic.

“For a long time I've been getting offers to make series which I think, at the moment, are more interesting and inventive than the movies, but none of them intrigued me so far,” Tanovic said. “Marjan Alcevski's script is amazingly written, and I'm really happy that HBO has recognized its quality and given me the opportunity to collaborate on it.”

Ana Balentovic and Johnathan Young will produce Success for HBO, together with Zagreb-based group Drugi plan.

HBO Europe has enjoyed considerable success, and critical praise, for its local-language originals, which include Czech political drama Burning Bush, Polish police thriller The Pack and Romanian crime drama Umbre.