Mina Panić obituary

My friend and former colleague, Mina Panić, who has died aged 57 from breast cancer, became a BBC TV director after leaving the former Yugoslavia with nothing more than a sharp intellect and an iron will.

Arriving penniless in London in 1988, she initially slept rough at Hyde Park Corner but soon found lodgings with compatriots. She taught herself French from movies after pretending to her boss at a restaurant that she could speak it. Fortunately, she was a gifted linguist, who already spoke English, Russian, four Balkan languages and Italian, picked up Polish on shoots and, after two days in Alexandria, was communicating in Arabic. During her last days she brushed up her Russian with the help of a Ukrainian nurse.

Born and raised in the northern city of Novi Sad, to Serb and Croat parents, Raja, a car mechanic, and his wife, Mira, Mina detested nationalist strife and always referred to her homeland, even after its breakup into seven new countries in the late 1990s, as “the former Yugoslavia”. At school (at Karlovic gymnasium in Novi Sad), her brilliance was quickly noticed by the state, which tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit her to the Communist party.

In London, her tips from the French restaurant paid for BA courses at SOAS – in art history and archaeology, then anthropology and film – until she was entitled to grants. Then she took an MA in television documentary at Goldsmiths, University of London, having worked and exhibited as a freelance photographer.

Joining the BBC in 1999, she climbed from researching to assistant producing and producing/directing, specialising in science, archaeology and history. She and I met while making a BBC Two Meet the Ancestors special in 2003 about Napoleon’s frozen retreat from Moscow. She selected entries from the diaries of thousands of French soldiers, which we dramatised in Lithuanian blizzards and minus 30C temperatures. I was credited producer/director, but it was really a collaboration. By then hooked on extreme weather, Mina volunteered for another gruelling three week MTA shoot in the Mauritanian Sahara where temperatures breached 50C and her digital thermometer melted.

Our next collaborations were on episodes of the BBC Two flagship history series Timewatch, where we introduced crowd-enlarging CGI to TV audiences in Zulu: The True Story (2003) and Who Killed Stalin? (2005). After meeting Stalin’s gutsy niece, Kira Alliluyeva, a gulags survivor, Mina named her first daughter Kira. Masha followed. Their father was the architect Carlo Negri, whom Mina met in 1998 and married in April this year in Sweden, where they made their last home.

Mina is survived by Carlo, her daughters, and her mother and brother, with whom Mina enjoyed idyllic summer holidays on Brač Island, in Croatia.