To Russia … and Bosnia .. and Latvia, with love: Latin America's quintessential cultural product—the TV melodrama—sees a storyline abroad

Latin Trade, July, 2003 by Greg Brown

Like Brazilian steel and sugar, the Globo novels is a product that's king at home--and that's the problem. "We're leaders in the market," says Bernardi. "If we're going to grow, we have to travel outside our borders." It doesn't hurt that scriptwriters are turning out bicultural stories, like the recent smash O Clon, about a Brazilian-born woman of Muslim parents who moves to Morocco. The serial is in contention to displace Betty la lea as the biggest global hit; O Clon's far-flung markets include Arab satellite TV.

Globo is typically looking to exploit a country hungry for programming but not entirely up to the task, either financially or culturally, Bernardi says. Success in selling a novela abroad "is directly inverse to how much they produce," she says. "It would be very hard for me to export to [Mexican media giant] Televisa, because they produce."

And that's how you get to Bosnia, a place where cab drivers can curse in Spanish because they watch so much Latin American television. Almir Sahinovic, a producer from Sarajevo, has come to the conference talk about the novela market in his home country. He is joined on the dais by a half-dozen people from eastern European countries that are, today, where Russian TV was a decade or so ago: Politically young, relatively poor, and struggling to pull together programming.

Sahinovic has equipment. He also has plenty of talented filmmakers and writers. What be doesn't have are ideas that will bring in ratings and money. He also doesn't have any notion of how to pace and produce a television drama. So he's plying the hallways of the conference, looking for bridges to the novela world.

Real stories. His company, Heft:, copied a common U.S. model--the situation comedy--and found itself with a hit. Now it's working on a Bosnian-made knock-off novela called Visa for the Future. At the summit, Chilean novela clips roll by on a giant screen with the professional flair of a flashy car commercial, but the Bosnian actors in Visa stammer through their lines in ratty apartments that look to be actual homes, not sets.

Sahinovic is undaunted. "Bosnia has 4 million people, but our language is spoken by 25 million on our borders," he says. Heft is talking with Italians about financing the new show, but what Sahinovic wants even more is a Latin American partner to teach him how novelas work.

Sahinovic does not lack for ideas. There are 10,000 foreigners living in Bosnia, he says, and his country has hosted Spanish peacekeeping soldiers from NATO for a decade. Perhaps a love story, he suggests, between a Bosnian woman who works at the United Nations a man from Spain. "It's not imaginary. We have real stories on the ground," he says. "You turn around and there are stories."

PASSION PLAY

Telenovela titles among the world's most-watched programs

       Latin America   Other Countries

1999        24               9
2000        32               7
2001        26              13
2002        42              12

SOURCE: Eurodata TV survey of 72 countries

Note: Table made from bar graph.