My buddy and former colleague, Mina Panić, who has died aged 57 from breast most cancers, turned a BBC TV director after leaving the previous Yugoslavia with nothing greater than a pointy mind and an iron will.
Arriving penniless in London in 1988, she initially slept tough at Hyde Park Nook however quickly discovered lodgings with compatriots. She taught herself French from motion pictures after pretending to her boss at a restaurant that she might communicate it. Luckily, she was a gifted linguist, who already spoke English, Russian, 4 Balkan languages and Italian, picked up Polish on shoots and, after two days in Alexandria, was speaking in Arabic. Throughout her final days she brushed up her Russian with the assistance of a Ukrainian nurse.
Born and raised within the northern metropolis of Novi Unhappy, to Serb and Croat dad and mom, Raja, a automobile mechanic, and his spouse, Mira, Mina detested nationalist strife and at all times referred to her homeland, even after its breakup into seven new nations within the late Nineties, as “the previous Yugoslavia”. In school (at Karlovic gymnasium in Novi Unhappy), her brilliance was rapidly observed by the state, which tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit her to the Communist occasion.
In London, her ideas from the French restaurant paid for BA programs at SOAS – in artwork historical past and archaeology, then anthropology and movie – till she was entitled to grants. Then she took an MA in tv documentary at Goldsmiths, College of London, having labored and exhibited as a contract photographer.
Becoming a member of the BBC in 1999, she climbed from researching to assistant producing and producing/directing, specialising in science, archaeology and historical past. She and I met whereas making a BBC Two Meet the Ancestors particular in 2003 about Napoleon’s frozen retreat from Moscow. She chosen entries from the diaries of hundreds of French troopers, which we dramatised in Lithuanian blizzards and minus 30C temperatures. I used to be credited producer/director, however it was actually a collaboration. By then hooked on excessive climate, Mina volunteered for an additional gruelling three week MTA shoot within the Mauritanian Sahara the place temperatures breached 50C and her digital thermometer melted.
Our subsequent collaborations had been on episodes of the BBC Two flagship historical past collection Timewatch, the place we launched crowd-enlarging CGI to TV audiences in Zulu: The True Story (2003) and Who Killed Stalin? (2005). After assembly Stalin’s gutsy niece, Kira Alliluyeva, a gulags survivor, Mina named her first daughter Kira. Masha adopted. Their father was the architect Carlo Negri, whom Mina met in 1998 and married in April this 12 months in Sweden, the place they made their final residence.
Mina is survived by Carlo, her daughters, and her mom and brother, with whom Mina loved idyllic summer season holidays on Brač Island, in Croatia.
