EXCLUSIVE: The creative team behind Canneseries competition show Operation Sabre wanted to tell a “bigger truth” through their drama about the assassination of Serbia‘s first pro-democracy prime minister, an event that remains raw in the public psyche.
No undertaking to tell the story of the killing of Zoran Đinđić in 2003 had been taken via TV drama, they told Deadline in the week leading up to the Cannes confab, and so they wanted to use scripted narrative devices to go beyond just this single event for the show being distributed by German major Beta Films. “Our main narrative device was creating these fictional characters and through them we told a story that is a bigger truth – not just the factual truth – of who we are as a society, why this was happening and the choices the characters were making,” said co-creator Goran Stankovic. “Having these characters helped us tell a point of view of a story that wasn’t enslaved within the facts.
We had to let that part go and be more free with the characters, to make it dramatically potent.” Đinđić was assassinated in 2003, one year after the opening of the trial against notorious former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and 14 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which completely reshaped the Balkans region.
Starring a wealth of well-known Serbian actors including Dragan Mićanović (Layer Cake) as Đinđić and Milica Gojkovic (Black Sun) as young journalist Danica, the series follows the aftermath of Đinđić’s death.
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