Czech producer Dagmar Sedláčková, partner at Prague-based firm MasterFilm, has been selected as this year’s Czech participant in the European Film Promotion’s Producers on the Move event in Cannes. Over the past decade, she has built a profile around auteur-driven projects, international co-productions and collaborations with emerging filmmakers. Her recent credits include Caravan, which became the first majority Czech feature in three decades to screen in the Un Certain Regard section and which later won the Czech Lion for Best Film. We spoke to her about sustaining long development processes, choosing collaborators, moving into series production and the projects she’s currently taking to Cannes.

Cineuropa: What decisions were crucial in sustaining Caravan through such a long and demanding development and production process?
Dagmar Sedláčková: I joined the project at a relatively advanced stage of development, after it had failed to secure production support twice from the Czech Audiovisual Fund. There was already a sense of fatigue around it, so part of my role was to bring fresh energy. What proved crucial was the project beginning to resonate internationally before securing domestic financing. Its success at Torino Film Lab and its selection for key platforms gave it visibility and momentum. Once the Czech funding came through, the broader financing structure followed through much more smoothly, with co-producers and broadcasters coming on board.

That didn’t mean the process was easy. When we were shooting in Italy, several crew members caught Covid, and as a debut feature film of considerable scale, we had to contend with floods, bad weather and a whole range of complications. Ultimately, the biggest challenge was sustaining our energy over time, but the personal nature of the story and our shared belief in its relevance kept the project moving forwards.

You often work with emerging filmmakers. What do you look for when deciding whether to collaborate?
The subject has to resonate with me on a personal level. I need to feel that I understand it deeply. These projects take years, so that connection is essential. Equally important is the person. I want to work with people I respect and with whom the collaboration can be genuinely enriching. I’m not interested in being a purely service-oriented producer. I want to be in dialogue with the filmmaker. I often say that I like to work with people with whom I feel we’re both looking at the same horizon.

Do filmmakers usually find you, or do you actively seek them out?
In most cases, they find me. The Czech film community is relatively small, so we tend to meet through shared networks. That said, I would like to be more proactive.

Your work includes a number of international co-productions. How do you approach finding the right partners?
I always try to make co-productions as organic as possible. I don’t want the structure to distort the material. Many of my collaborations come out of workshops like EAVE or Eurodoc, where you build relationships over time. I prefer to work with people I know or have a sense of. Working with someone entirely unknown can be risky. If you share a similar sensibility, even something as simple as a sense of humour, it often translates into a better working dynamic when challenges arise.

You’ve also started working more in series production. What drew you to that format?
It’s partly about learning and responding to how the market is evolving. But there’s also a practical aspect to it. Auteur films take a very long time. We’ve been working on Sisters for four years and we’re still in the middle of the process. With series, the timeline is much shorter. With the true crime miniseries Case Kramný, development and production combined took around two years, and then suddenly the project was out there, with immediate audience feedback. As a producer, that’s very energising. It’s refreshing to complete something within a shorter timeframe and to experience that direct response.

Which projects are you presenting in Cannes?
The main project is Sisters, a documentary essay by Tereza Bernátková, which is currently in production and will be presented at Cannes Docs. It’s a Czech-Slovak-French co-production built around a remarkable archival discovery: around ten hours of 8mm footage shot between the 1950s and 1970s inside an institution for women with intellectual disabilities. The material offers a unique perspective on care, marginalisation and lived experience, and we’re combining it with contemporary observation and archival records.

Another project is The Sow, which I’m developing with the director of Father, Tereza Nvotová. It’s still at an early stage, but it explores a more genre-inflected direction, combining psychological drama with elements of body horror. For me, it’s an exciting project because it allows us to work with genre while staying very close to an authorial perspective and a character-driven story.

You’re also a co-founder of Girls in Film Prague. What are your next goals there?
We’ve been active for eight years, largely on a voluntary basis. In the beginning, our focus was on opening up discussion about inequality in the industry and pushing institutions to acknowledge it. That has started to change. We now have data that clearly shows the imbalance.

The next step is to move towards more practical support. We would like to expand mentoring, help emerging filmmakers gain access to sets, and potentially establish a small fund or grant scheme. The goal is to move from raising awareness to actively supporting the next generation.