I am drawn to stories that emerge from the fissures where human lives intersect with the grinding plates of geopolitics. Stringers is such a story – a narrative that feels both urgently contemporary and classically tragic, and it is one I am deeply committed to bringing to the screen. My collaboration with the screenwriter Nikola Kuprešanin is now in its fifth year. It is a partnership built on a shared language of cinema and a mutual understanding of the complex, often darkly ironic, realities of our region. Our workflow is a continuous dialogue, a process of refining and focusing a story's emotional truth alongside its narrative drive. Kuprešanin’s powerful treatment for Stringers, with its richly drawn characters navigating a world of pervasive paranoia, is a testament to this fruitful creative symbiosis and the perfect foundation for this project. This story resonates with me on a profoundly personal level. Having lived through the Siege of Sarajevo, I have a visceral understanding of how a modern European country can become a pressure cooker of fear, corruption, and unexpected humanity. The Balkans and the Baltics are kindred spirits in this regard – both are regions where the euphoria of post-Cold War independence has been tempered by lingering contemporary empires, the corrosive reality of corruption, and the unsettling feeling of being a pawn in a game played by great powers. Stringers captures this exact sentiment: the crushing helplessness of the individual against vast, impersonal forces, and the incredible resilience that emerges in response. Visually and tonally, I see this series as a fusion of the chilling, mist-enshrouded atmospherics of True Detective with the intricate, multi-layered geopolitical plotting of The Night Manager. We will contrast the many faces of Riga – the sleek, cold glamour of its elite spaces and the gritty, Soviet-era texture of its underbelly – with the silent, ominous beauty of the borderland forests, which will feel both breathtaking and terrifying, much like the landscapes in ZeroDarkThirty. At its core, this is a human tragedy set against a backdrop of hybrid warfare. It is a murder mystery that unravels into a spy thriller, but its heart beats with the very real drama of the migrant crisis. Being a refugee and a migrant myself in my youth and witnessing the similar recent human tragedy in the Balkans region – which is seen in my award-winning short documentary When We Were Them – this subject is especially important to me. My approach is never to let the audience forget the human cost of geopolitical games. The camera will linger on the faces of the desperate, the conflicted, and the corrupt with the same unflinching empathy. The relevance of Stringers cannot be overstated. It is a mirror held up to the very real disinformation campaigns and weaponisation of migrants that is taking place on NATO’s borders today. At the same time, this is not a simplistic tale of good versus evil. My experience has taught me that humanity is never so binary. This story will show the good and the bad on all sides – the compromised US correspondent, the noble Russian veteran, the Latvian nationalist seeking redemption. The ultimate message is one of necessary unity: that in the face of calculated division, our only hope is to find common humanity. This is a story that requires a delicate hand to balance its thriller elements with its profound human drama. It is a challenge I feel my entire career has prepared me for. I am eager to guide this exceptional project from page to screen, to build a world that is both terrifyingly real and compellingly cinematic, and to tell a story that matters.