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Next year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and it’s no surprise networks and distributors are gathering the troops to commemorate. With war spreading in the Middle East and conflicts ongoing elsewhere around the world, the poignancy of programming in this area has been amplified this year.
What sets apart the noisiest of the new productions in this space that are heading for MIPCOM in Cannes, is that many of them aren’t using the global conflict as the actual setting for their stories. Instead, the war is a jumping-off point for wider, exploratory narratives, and themes different to those in traditional programs.
Among the most notable is the six-episode drama series A World Divided, which integrates archive footage with fictional drama. The series follows six people whose personal and political stories crystallized divisions and decisions that impacted the Second World War through to the beginning of the Cold War in the 1960s.
Delia Mayer, known for her role in Netflix’s Unorthodox, plays Golda Meir, who would become Israel’s first and only female prime minister. Meriel Hinsching (Das Boot) plays New Mexico atomic bomb scientist Joan Hinton; Lupin’s Moussa Sylla is Martinique’s anti-German freedom fighter Frantz Fanon; Max Wagner (German Crime Story: Gefesselt) plays German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun; Lara Mandoki is Hedwig Höss, wife of Auschwitz concentration camp leader Rodolf Höss and mother to his children; and Denys Rodnianskyi plays future Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev. Directors are Poland’s Olga Chajdas, who shot the Höss scenes on location in Auschwitz, and Frank Devos. Lead producer LOOKSfilm has made shows such as 14 — Diaries of the Great War and will be in Cannes with the series. A trio of European pubcasters are on board already.
Chadjas says there was “no agenda in terms of an anniversary,” and instead the only mission statement was to show that “history likes to repeat itself.” For that reason, even villainous characters such as Höss, whose husband was responsible for the worst atrocities of World War II, are presented “without judgment”.
In a similar vein, Fremantle will be shopping M. Son of the Century, the buzzy Joe Wright-directed Sky Studios series about Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, played by Luca Marinelli. Adapted from Antonio Scurati’s bestselling novel, it charts the rise of fascism in Italy and Mussolini’s story in the 1920s. Season 1 captures 10 years of Il Duce’s life, building towards the murder of socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti.
In an interview with Deadline at the Venice Film Festival last month, Wright said the series was fundamentally about “how dreadful men can be” and added he was interested in the Italian response, as “Italy has never fully faced up to its fascist past.”
With populism and far-right politics beginning to take hold in Europe and the Americas once again, conflict in the Middle East appearing out of control and Russia’s attack on Ukraine continuing unabated, productions that remind us of the horrors of war might play a bigger role than just filling schedules and stocking streamer interfaces.
