Dominika Ondrušková: A screenwriter who can handle French taxes – and reality-show casting

Still, she wanted to give it a fair chance. The turning point came during an Erasmus stay in France. Alongside French, she studied economics – and that was when she properly discovered what she didn’t want to do. “When you’re learning about French taxes in French, things become very clear,” she says with a smile. She managed everything, passed the exams, but walked away with one main certainty, her path would lead elsewhere. She finished her studies anyway and later secured a translation internship at the European Commission. In many ways, it was great – an international environment, new people, shared events, trips, a life constantly in motion. But it also made one thing unmistakable, a nine-to-five office routine wasn’t for her. She didn’t want to keep processing other people’s texts. She wanted to write her own.

The next logical stop was FAMU. She applied twice and got in on her second attempt, to screenwriting. Today she says she arrived at her field later than some, but she doesn’t see that as a disadvantage; she sees it as part of her path. She travelled a lot, moved between environments, languages, and ways of living – and that experience is exactly what she draws on now in her writing. “I’m probably the kind of screenwriter who needs to live through a lot first,” she says.

When she received an email from FAMU about CME Content Academy, what caught her attention most was the focus on series writing – something she felt was missing at school. She had tried writers’ rooms, but had the sense that series and television still sat slightly on the margins. And yet that was where she’d been drawn for a long time. She watched films too, of course but series even more. She wanted to understand how they’re made, how they’re developed, and how people think about them in practice, not only in a seminar room.

Her biggest surprise, in the end, was R&E. Before the entrance exams she hadn’t really considered it. She watched the first episode of Love Island mainly out of obligation simply so she’d know what people were talking about. But the more she heard about how reality shows are produced in lectures, the clearer it became that there was something here that genuinely interested her.

At the same time, one foot stayed in fiction. She even tried an internship on Ulice, but quickly realised that alongside school, an R&E internship, her own writing, and preparations for a short film, it would simply be too much. She still sees Ulice as an exceptionally valuable experience. She enjoyed watching the carefully designed system behind a long-running series, and how precisely the creators think about characters, not as figures on paper, but as real people. In the end, however, she chose an internship with Kateřina Pavlík on a newly developing project. That was where she understood how much she thrives in an environment that is fast, shifting, and unpredictable: one day casting, the next a meeting, then preparation, then something completely different.

R&E also suited her temperament in a way she hadn’t expected. Dominika says she has been fascinated by observing people her whole life. How they speak, what they reveal, what they try to hide, and how they behave when they believe they have everything under control. She used to channel that passion mainly into writing characters. In R&E, she realised it has the same value in casting and format development. Being able to read someone in a few minutes, feel their energy, and imagine what might happen to them on camera is not only useful for her, it’s genuinely fun. Unpredictability doesn’t drain her. It gives her energy.

Her new enthusiasm for R&E doesn’t mean she’s leaving screenwriting behind. She’s preparing her first short film, which she plans to direct herself, and she continues to develop her own series projects. It’s telling that even there, fiction and reality keep meeting again.

A major source of inspiration for her has been the people she met through the Academy. In the R&E team, the most defining figure for her has been Kateřina Pavlík, whom she was able to shadow over a longer period while also actively contributing to projects – whether in the post-production of The Bachelor or in preparing new ones. The experience gave her a very concrete sense of how to think, how to communicate within a wider team, and what, for example, a kick-off meeting looks like before shooting begins. Beyond Kateřina, she also mentions Eva Krutáková, Pavel Brabec, and Jiří Charvát. She enjoyed working with this group and admires the team’s professionalism, their speed of thinking and their ability to respond flexibly when things don’t go according to plan.

On the fiction side, she values the mentoring of Maja Hamplová. Their shared goal is to bring a project into the shape in which it can be presented to a programming board, something Dominika says film schools typically don’t teach. She also appreciates feedback from Michal Reitler, who has a sharp sense for current trends and audience preferences. And she was deeply impressed by Iva Bergrová, the head dramaturg of Ulice, who carries the entire series in her head with striking precision.

Looking ahead, what she wants most is to write a six-episode mini-series that actually gets made. In the subjects she’s drawn to, she repeatedly returns to true crime and women’s stories. That’s also why the upcoming Monyová project caught her attention for its strong female perspective, its focus on femicide, and the tension between an intimate story and a broader social statement.

What she values most about CME Content Academy is that it doesn’t force students into a single template. It doesn’t try to turn everyone into the same kind of creator. Instead, it pays attention to what each person is strong at and pushes them further in that direction. In Dominika, it clearly recognised a screenwriter who can write, but also reads people and situations with unusual speed. And that’s a combination that can go a long way in television.