About The Last Socialist Artefact
The Last Socialist Artefact, known in Croatian as Tvornica and adapted from Robert Perisic's novel No-Signal Area (Podrucje bez signala), is a six-part drama from Croatian public broadcaster HRT. It follows two self-styled urban survivors from Zagreb, the smooth-talking entrepreneur Oleg and his cousin Nikola, a long-idle engineer, who travel to a remote, half-forgotten town when a shadowy buyer places an order for a particular kind of turbine. To deliver it, they must coax a derelict socialist-era factory, and the people who once ran it, back to life.
What begins as a quick business scheme becomes a study of a community suspended between a vanished Yugoslav past and an uncertain capitalist present. Oleg's promises of revived wages and dignity draw the town's old workforce back to the assembly line, led by the proud foreman Branos, but the deal rests on murky money and a client whose true intentions remain hidden. As the turbine slowly takes shape, so do the tensions, resentments, and fragile hopes of everyone betting on it.
Directed by Dalibor Matanic, the series blends deadpan dark comedy with social realism and a faintly absurdist edge, using the factory as a microcosm of the post-socialist Balkans. A regional co-production financed primarily by HRT, it won the top prize for Best Drama Series at the 2022 Sarajevo Film Festival, along with honors for direction, acting, and screenplay, and reached international audiences through festival circuits and outlets such as Walter Presents.
