History of the Studio
The Studio is the successor of the former Bulgarian state-owned Boyana Film Studio, established in 1962 as the main feature film and television production facility in the country until the early 1990′s.
During the years of communism (1945-1989), the Studios produces nearly 600 feature films and production peaked at around 25 features annually in the 1980s (in addition, about 20 television films, as well as 400 shorts and animated film were released every year).
By the mid-1980s, the Bulgarian film industry employed about 2,000 highly qualified workers engaged around the Boyana film studio and a number of production units for feature, documentary, and animation films.
Hit by financial difficulties in the 1990s, an inventive policy of “services-rendering” was the lifeline of Boyana Studios for nearly a decade. The Bulgarian film industry is largely relied on co-productions (where the country participates as a secondary co-producing partner) and runaway productions (big budget productions exclusively using Western creative input that only hire local facilities, technicians, and locations) to keep the studio going. During the 1990s services were rendered to a dozen major productions, which included Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Little Buddha” (1993), Emir Kusturitza’s “Underground” (1995), Reji Vernie’s “East-West” ( 1998) , Vercingétorix” (1999), Michael Cacoyannis’s screen adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1999)…
In 2007, Boyana Film Studios are privatized and “Nu Boyana Film” is created.
Our studios are currently owned by the Hollywood-based Production companies Nu-Image and Millennium Films. The company was founded in 1992 under the name Nu Image, Inc.