Purple Travel
[October 10 2014]
A visit to MediaPro Studios, Bucharest
Established in the late 50’s, about 20km out of Bucharest, “Buftea Studios” (now MediaPro studios) were a big shot in producing an average of 20 films per year throughout the communist era. International service productions from all over Europe were made alongside Romanian movies, rewarding the studios with a reputation for creating high profile pictures. After the Romanian revolution in 1989, the movie industry suffered quite a bit and it took some devastating time until the studios were finally revivified by the local media giant MediaPro, which purchased them in 1998. In the past decade cheap workforce and low overhead costs in eastern Europe caught the international film industry’s eye and led to a trend to produce movies from all over the world in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Nowadays the MediaPro studios are frequented by people such as Costa Gavras, Claude Lelouch, Donald Sutherland, and Rachel Weisz, while art house is shot alongside trashy horror flicks. Text and photo Philipp Draxler
