It is 1948 when socialist Yugoslavia breaks relations with the USSR and all dissidents, real and alleged,are locked up in the perfect prison: the island of Goli Otok. Wandering writer Lawrence Durrell, future author of the exquisite Alexandria Quartet, makes ends meet as a spy on behalf of the British Embassy in Belgrade and ends up discovering what he should not.
Private letters, diary pages, coded messages, tickets, police reports, lists, strictly confidential communications, and newspaper articles bring to life a polyphonic historical fresco, in which the mixture of documentary reality and literary invention, thanks to a fast-paced narrative with a cinematic rhythm, restores the climate of suspicion and violence of the Cold War in all its tragic nature.
GORAN MARKOVIĆ (Belgrade, 1946) is among the most important directors of Serbian and former Yugoslav cinema. The son of actors Rade and Olivera Marković, he trained artistically in Prague at FAMU, a renowned film academy where directors such as Emir Kusturica and Goran Paskaljević, among others, studied. Starting in the late 1970s, he came to prominence with a series of provocative and visionary films in which he portrayed Serbian society and its contradictions during the crisis of Yugoslav socialism, the conflicts of the 1990s and the post-Milošević years, often adopting a surreal and bitterly ironic point of view.
Also active as a playwright and screenwriter, he has won several international awards and was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic in 2012.
Author of three novels, with The Belgrade Trio he was nominated for the 2018 NIN Award for the best novel of the year in the Serbian language.
Dialogue with Sergio M. Grmek Germani, an expert on Balkan cinema, contributes to the newspapers Il manifesto, Il Piccolo, Primorski dnevnik and the film magazines La cosa vista (of which he is founder), Filmcritica, FilmTv.
