Abstract
This article focuses on a profession of key importance for understanding today's screen industries in Central-Eastern Europe: the independent producer. Using the approach of critical production studies, the article focuses on producers' 'reflexivity' to reveal how their professional identity is being constructed and how they are positioning themselves within the broader ecology of the media industry.
By analysing a set of semi-structured interviews with Czech producers of all kinds, this article identifies five recurrent tropes related to their 'self-conceptions'. The tropes demonstrate how the producers perform their identities differently from their UK or US counterparts: as largely disempowered, dependent on public support and on the powerful public service broadcaster, desperately looking for more stability, autonomy and recognition.