N.Y’s Kalafatis Teams With Bulgaria’s Nu Boyana for Greek Venture

It will be pairing of a New York-based film production studio owned by a Greek-American with a Bulgarian company that's already lured big Hollywood movies - the new business going to break ground on a studio in Thessaloniki, writes The National Herald.

Bulgaria's Nu Boyana Studios, which has serviced blockbusters like Sylvester Stallones' The Expendables franchise and the upcoming Rambo V, is preparing to break ground for the new studio in Greece's second-largest city as the country tries to change its reputation as being unfriendly to filmmakers - even losing the Mamma Mia sequel.

Nu Boyana will team with John Kalafatis, CEO of York Studios, in a venture that's being called Nu Boyana Hellenic to reflect the heritage of both countries, and their work in preparing settings for films, with hopes, more will be coming to Greece which is offering movie makers cash rebates of up to 35 percent after keeping them away with an unfriendly attitude.

"With Greece announcing its tax rebates, we started looking a lot more seriously at what opportunities are there," Nu Boyana Film Studios CEO Yariv Lernerr told Variety magazine. "We realized it's a great country with great locations, but not much infrastructure."

Last fall Lerner announced a partnership with the Greek National Center of Audiovisual Media and Communication (EKOME) to train young Greek film professionals in Sofia. "There's a lot of good professionals that are Greek, but a lot of them work outside Greece. There's no real base in that industry," he said.

Indeed, one of the new darlings of Hollywood is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, but he got so little cooperation in Greece in his early years that he's moved to London and even the BBC had trouble getting permission to film part...