CALL FOR ENTRIES: Exploring Synergies: Gaming × Audiovisual

 

Applications are open to audiovisual and gaming professionals from across Southeast Europe.

 

CineLink Industry Days, the industry platform of the Sarajevo Film Festival, invites established producers, writers, directors, game developers, narrative designers and related professionals from across Southeast Europe to apply for the first Gaming × Audiovisual edition of Exploring Synergies — a focused, practice-driven workshop developed in partnership with Mad Head Games and hosted inside their Belgrade studio in September 2026.

 

 

Exploring Synergies is a strand of CineLink Industry Days Talents & Skills (CIDTS) devoted to how intellectual property moves, is developed and holds value across creative industries. It brings professionals from different sectors into one room to work through the practical realities of adaptation, rights and cross-media development, treating IP not as a legal afterthought but as a creative and strategic competence.

 

The strand was designed for the specific conditions of Southeast Europe, where creators generate strong original work but often operate with limited leverage over rights, adaptation chains and the long-term exploitation of their creative assets. Exploring Synergies exists to strengthen exactly those capacities and to build the cross-sector relationships through which they become real.

 

 

Gaming and audiovisual are two of the most dynamic creative sectors in the region, yet they largely operate in parallel. They speak different professional languages, finance their work through different models, and build audiences in different ways, despite a growing overlap in IP logic, world-building, format expansion and long-term narrative value.

 

Game studios develop rich original worlds, characters and stories, and are building growing expertise in long-term IP and audience engagement; audiovisual producers bring their own experience of narrative, development and financing, and an increasing interest in how games work. Yet the two sectors rarely sit at the same table, let alone work through a shared property together. Exploring Synergies is a space to begin that exchange, a working environment where both sides can engage with each other's production logic, financing realities and narrative structures, and explore where their common ground might lie.

 

 

Exploring Synergies first proved this method with the literary publishing industry, where a single workshop grew into concrete cross-border collaboration between publishers, writers and producers across the region, from the launch of CineLink Books to optioned novels and shared writers' rooms. This edition carries the same spirit into a new field: it is not a market event or a set of conclusions to be delivered, but an open exploration, designed to help two sectors that rarely meet discover where their common ground actually lies.

 

The programme is developed in partnership with Mad Head Games, a Saber Interactive studio with more than 15 years of experience, over 67 games produced, and teams in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Sarajevo. Their involvement grounds the exploration in real practice: participants work alongside an established studio with deep experience in original IP, world-building and international production, rather than in a theoretical exercise.

 

Host & venue:  Mad Head Studio, Belgrade 

Dates:  24.-27.9.2026

Format:  2.5-day on-site intensive, followed by an online deep-dive session

Participants:  Up to 25 - established producers, writers, directors, game developers, narrative designers and related professionals

Eligibility:  Professionals based in any of the 21 Southeast European territories covered by CineLink: Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo*, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Türkiye and Ukraine

Working language:  English

Cost:  No tuition fee. Accommodation is covered by the programme; participants cover their own travel.

 

 

The workshop is organised around five thematic blocks. The first four build a shared foundation across the two sectors; the fifth puts that foundation to work on a real Mad Head property, with input from the studio's own team. The blocks combine expert framing, peer exchange, direct instruction and hands-on work.

 

Where gaming and audiovisual misread each other, and why. A shared map of how each sector is structured - development cycles, key roles, decision points - and the assumptions that get in the way of collaboration. The aim of this opening block is a common working vocabulary before anything else.

 

How each sector raises capital and earns it back. On the audiovisual side: public funding, co-production, pre-sales, broadcaster and platform commissioning, recoupment. On the gaming side: publisher and platform deals, premium versus free-to-play, DLC and live-service revenue, community-driven monetisation. Where the models converge, where they diverge, and what each side tends to underestimate about the other.

 

Intellectual property as a strategic asset rather than a legal afterthought. Ownership and rights structures, the long-term value of a world and its characters, and the cross-media potential of an IP across games, film, series and beyond, including how to open a property to new formats without losing strategic control of it.

 

What happens to a story when it moves between an interactive and a linear medium. World-building, character and player agency; the tension between game structure and screen narrative; who follows an IP and how audiences behave across formats. Practical thinking about narrative transfer, in both directions and about long-term audience value.

 

The hands-on core of the workshop. Working directly with a Mad Head property, and with the studio's own team, participants move through the themes above as applied to a real IP: its financing, its narrative, its audience and its cross-media potential.

 

 

 

We are looking for a balanced room of experienced professionals from both sectors who are genuinely curious about the other. Strong candidates include:

• Producers, writers and directors working in film, television or series with an interest in gaming, adaptation or IP development.

• Game developers, narrative designers, creative directors and producers working in studios or independently, with an interest in the audiovisual sector.
  
  
• Professionals from adjacent roles, rights and development, transmedia, publishing, whose work sits between the two fields.

• This is not an entry-level programme. We ask that applicants bring professional experience, a real motivation to work across sectors, and ideally a project, IP or question of their own to test in the room.

 

Application deadline:  August 5, 2026 

To apply, complete the application form by the deadline. 

 

For questions about the call, contact industry@sff.ba