Lionsgate buys rights to 'Rest in Peace' format

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Lionsgate, one of the five largest film and television studios in the world, has bought the rights to the format of the acclaimed domestic drama series produced for HRT by an independent production company.

Young television journalist Lucija Car and retired prison guard Martin Strugar, played by Judita Franković and Miodrag Krivokapić, explored a forgotten prison cemetery in twelve exciting episodes shown in early 2013, revealing the hidden secrets and human destinies of transitional Croatia, the part of our recent past we like to forget and so far we have not often had the opportunity to see it on either big or small screens. Already in the first run, the series collected undivided praise from domestic professional critics, equally praised for its script, production quality, and numerous acting creations. Both directors of the series, Goran Rukavina and Kristijan Milić were nominated for the Croatian Theater Award, which was won by Milić, and the main actress Judita Franković was nominated for Večernjak's Ruža Award.

As the first drama series from Croatia, "Rest in Peace" entered the official selection of one of the largest festivals of television drama production in Seoul, South Korea, in 2013, where it competed with the world's best series and was noticed by the international public. In the summer of 2013, American producers contacted the international distributor of the Croatian series, the Swedish company Eccho Rights, showing interest in buying the format. Lionsgate is one of the largest production and distribution companies in the world whose film hits "The Twilight Saga" and "Hunger Games" have won world box offices in recent years, and their esteemed TV series are well known to Croatian viewers who could see on domestic programs: "Mad Men", "Weeds", "Nurse Jackie", "Nashville", "Anger Management" with Charlie Sheen, as well as last year’s big Netflix hit “Orange is the New Black,” whose new season is in the making. At the moment, Lionsgate is showing about thirty premiere TV series on about twenty different channels in America alone. Cinema distribution alone generated more than $2 billion in revenue last year, and digital home entertainment channels another $1 billion.

The author of the format "Rest in Peace", created according to the original idea of Koraljka Meštrović and Goran Rukavina, and under the supervision of the main screenwriter Saša Podgorelec with collaborators Ivor Martinić and Ivan Turković Krnjak, is Dario Vince, former international award-winning creative director of Digitel, and owner of Ring produkcija that sold the rights to Lionsgate. In 1987, Dario Vince was a finalist and winner of the special jury award of the EBU competition for young European screenwriters.

The series was selected at the HRT competition in 2011, and filmed in 2012 under the tutelage of the editor of the HRT drama program Mislav Brumec, dramaturgist Drago Kekanović, and series editor Maja Gregl.

While Ring produkcija is preparing for the final negotiations with HRT on the shooting of the second season of the series Rest in Peace, we cannot expect the first episodes of the American version before 2015, when we will hopefully be able to watch it on our screens.

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'Rest in peace' - the peak of domestic feature TV production

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There is no doubt that some moments, and probably entire episodes of this series, will be difficult for some viewers, but one of the basic tasks of good drama series is to shake and wake up the audience.

For a long time now, no domestic drama series has appeared on Croatian television that would fit into the world trend of flourishing television fiction. Local TV commissioners obviously don't even think that viewers expect more from the series, so they mistakenly believe in the inexhaustibility of interest in nonsense and frantically release soap operas, occasionally allowing themselves, in attacks of insane adventure, to dive into more or less successful comedies. The dramas have stalled somewhere at the level of the seventies, they are mostly bad to mediocre, so the axiom about TV big shots that are afraid of their own shadow has already taken root; that is why they do not try to find out whether the audience is ready for the so-called more demanding content, wondering in a cold sweat if such decision would turn off the audience or, God forbid, anger someone sensitive with cash in their pocket. For a long time, it seemed that no one offered them anything of quality because of that.

The new drama series 'Rest in Peace', which airs on January 4 on HTV's First Channel, breaks down these obstacles and assumptions on several levels - at least judging by the first three episodes. In them, a young journalist Lucija Car (Judita Franković) reveals the secrets of those buried in the cemetery of the old prison scheduled for demolition, with the help of retired prison guard Martin Strugar (Miodrag Krivokapić). In each episode, the story of one grave unfolds, although, behind the backs of a dynamic duo, an evil spirit released from a bottle in the first episode recedes throughout the series.

Already in the first three episodes, catching up with world trends is very noticeable. I’m not saying that a revolution erupts from every frame or that HBO will stumble on creators' doorstep tomorrow crying with envy, but in the context of domestic production, the series is not only a shift but also an Air-Jordan kind of leap towards better. First and foremost, it looks worldly (silly and inaccurate adjective, I know, but you know what I mean), and not just because of the shooting technique and beautiful filters that achieve the gloomy-brownish atmosphere of digging through a troubled past. There are also wonderful details such as when Lucija meets Martin in the courtyard of his old Zagreb building (Ratkajev prolaz) and the yard looks like a prison, which suggests that the old cat never stopped being a guard. The girls and guys who put it together, therefore, know how to express themselves visually and we finally got a series that can’t be watched as a radio drama, with your back facing the TV. A dose of claustrophobia is also brilliantly evoked, inevitable for a story so much about prison: everything takes place in somewhat cramped spaces, car interiors, cells, shelters, and backrooms of shabby nightclubs, in front of many scenes the door is half or completely closed, and the whole suffocating atmosphere is thickened by a soundtrack with a finely hit ratio of melancholy and sinisterness.

But if that was the only thing that counts in the series, everyone would normally give up watching at half of the first episode (we can also see beautiful visual elements in documentaries about animals on National Geographic), but fortunately - it's not like that. Besides looking nice, the stories and characters from the first three episodes are also quite interesting, there is zero chance they'll bother you with anything, but they also won't allow you to cook beans along the way. There is everything here: from prison psychopaths who show their dominance over the environment in the first sentence to the revealing of the character of prison guards (which is perhaps the strongest for me), whose morals and emotions cannot remain intact in the environment of a repressive and unhappy institution. The actors are excellent - I didn't expect anything less from the legendary Krivokapić, Judita Franković is convincing and nice, Janko Popović Volarić achieved something truly exceptional in the third episode with astonishingly few words, and I will write about Nada Gačešić Livaković later. They did, however, have grateful material. Namely, the characters they play are very layered and enriched with a bunch of inherent details, and along the way, they are given sentences that the viewer can imagine being uttered by a normal human being, which is almost a precedent in domestic production.

Much has already been said and written about the third episode of the series, mostly because of the painful presentation of the relationship between Croats and Serbs in the early 1990s. This Serbo-Croatian blues, from which no one in this country has been able to heal since the church schism, was miraculously not described in this series through a strict war perspective. Yes, air-raid sirens are heard, Vukovar and someone's son who returned from the battlefield without legs are mentioned, but there is no uniform other than that of the prison guards, no shooting or trench mud, not even flags. The whole story is told much more uneasily: through the prism of prison bullies, but also through the atmosphere of fear and intolerance in neighborhoods, through scenes of neighbors refusing to hold the door as you enter the building, and through shots of graffitis sprayed on the front door of someone's private apartment. There is nothing new in this - we all know that such things have happened, we have all, regardless of ethnicity, heard humiliating sentences about 'our boys and your boys' in shelters, but this is something completely new, and completely different fitted in the story than ever before. This fit into the story is summarized by a brilliant sentence by Martin Strugar. 'War is on the other side of the fence', he told a group of prison thugs. 'But here, inside - brotherhood and unity! You are all the same to me! You are all brothers in crime.' The sentence was uttered in 1992, from the inner building of the prison fence and far from the real, outer reality, but it resonates throughout the episode and is applicable far more widely. It will surely sit hard on someone's stomach. And it should.

The third episode is, therefore, undoubtedly important, but as a personal favorite I would still single out the second. The much less (actually not at all) politically charged story of a girl who died in prison at the age of nineteen is deeply shocking, even emotionally devastating, not only because of the really dark story of the deceased but also because of the character of prison guardian Josipa. I have never been a special fan of Nada Gačešić Livaković and until a few days I would rudely claim that her last good role was in 'Kapelski kresovi'. Here, however, she knocked me off my feet and her buzzword 'You little trash' in one of the last scenes almost literally broke my heart (I totally broke, yes). The second episode is also the most skilfully performed: the time jumps by which the series is recognizable are somehow the most subtle, and the hints of past events (for example, mother's suicide) are perfectly shortened to just as much information as the viewer needs to reconstruct the events himself, without superfluous explanations (a stylistic procedure that domestic TV authors have so far feared like hell).

Of course, this one, like any other series, is not without flaws. Hair from an egg could be pulled out because some (mostly younger) actors sometimes (less often than elsewhere) sound like they are reading a text from a teleprompter, Lucija lives with her retired mother and sick brother in a slightly too cozy apartment, scenes from Lucija's office are clichéd and copy-pasted from American series (along with exclamations: 'You’re suspended!'), and because from the first three episodes, it’s not even clear why Lucija’s boyfriend even exists as a notable figure in the series. We could object a bit to the obvious product placement of some little things, as well as the fact that the author's affection for the Danish 'Forbrydelsen', some tricks from 'Forgotten Case' and Helen Mirren from her inspector Jane Tennison's phase is very clear, but they are all minor things, so far quite insignificant for the general assessment.

And the general evaluation is - don’t miss this series. We’ve never seen anything like that from domestic production. And it was really about time.

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A series that will provoke controversy

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The series will surely provoke fierce controversy because the opening of graves is actually a metaphor for digging through the cancerous wounds of Croatian society.

After several months of struggle, HTV finally included the series "Rest in Peace" in the program. The slot is not bad, Friday at 9.45 pm on the First Program, where the first season of "Boardwalk Empire" has been shown so far, but the question remains why we had to wait so long for a drama product that is among the most interesting that HTV has broadcast so far. We may never find out if the project was too provocative for someone or the reason is banaler (the series was ordered by HTV's team which was then fired, and a new one was looking for a hair in the egg to prove that the predecessors didn't do their job well). Procrastination is more absurd if we know that our drama program has been dying out for years, and when a series of this caliber appears, HTV members, no matter what lobby or clan they belong to, should embrace it as a first-class sensation. The series "Rest in Peace" was produced by the production company Ring Multimedia on behalf of HTV, but its previous programs (its most successful soap opera "Valley of the Sun") did not really prepare us for such a surprise. The first synopsis was written by Koraljka Meštrović and Goran Rukavina, the head of the team that wrote the scripts for each of the 12 episodes was Saša Podgorelec, and the well-known young playwright Ivor Martinić and Ivan Turković Krnjak also collaborated with him. Rukavina and Kristijan Milić were chosen as directors (he won the Golden Arena in Pula for the war drama "The Living and the Dead") and the director of photography Mario Sablić often collaborated with Ring Multimedia (he also recorded last year's hit "Koko and the Ghosts").

Almost the entire Croatian acting cream was cast in 170 speech roles, but the best opportunities were given to Judita Franković from "Sonja and the Bull" and Miodrag Krivokapić, once a big star of Croatian theater, who moved to Belgrade in the early 1990s. Our leading animator Simon Bogojević Narath made an impressive opening credit. The main virtue of the series is that it rests on the original premise: it is not an adaptation of any foreign genre model, but an ingenious format perfect for licensing in other transition countries that have gone through similar historical upheavals as Croatia. The plot begins today, when the editor Zdeslav (Boris Svrtan) orders young television journalist Lucija Car (Franković) to make a seemingly routine report on the closure of the Vukovšćak penitentiary: our country's accession to the European Union is approaching, and the prison does not meet modern European standards (Vukovšćak, of course, does not exist, but a similar fate will threaten our actual prisons).

Lucija's attention is drawn to the improvised cemetery in the yard of Vukovščak, so she is intrigued by who is buried in it. She learns that these are prisoners whose bodies no one wanted to take over or who had no family. When a rag doll falls out of a coffin, and it turns out that a certain Zdenko Jurković (Dragan Despot) faked his own death in this way, Lucija seems to have discovered a great sensation. Her editor doesn't think so either, but the resourceful girl is ready to embark on this venture even without his approval. However, she needs something more important, and that is an "insider" who knew the prison and its "tenants" well. She fraudulently manages to obtain prison files, but the names mentioned in it mean nothing to her. However, retired prison guard Martin Strugar (Krivokapić), who is not willing to cooperate with her at first, but later changes his mind knows those names well. The story takes place on two levels: in the first, Lucija competes with Martin, who wants to keep a lot of things quiet, supported by her college colleague Željko Ban (Luka Dragić), now a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, but her boyfriend, promising politician Boris Drobnjak (Ozren Grabarić), is not thrilled with her investigation. At the same time, the girl is constantly receiving threatening text messages and other unpleasant warnings, which she assumes come from Jurković: he used to work for the Yugoslav secret agency UDBA, and now has a powerful protector in the Croatian political leadership.

In each episode, the fate of one of the prisoners buried in the cemetery is revealed. Some got there during socialism, such as the young communist Marko Glavina (Ivan Glowatzky), who hoped to be received by Tito, but instead got stuck in prison because he had the same name and surname as a political emigrant. Young Lola (Lana Vukićević) ended up in prison for a minor offense, but the prison guardian Josipa (Nada Gaćešić Livaković) started tricking her with other convicts. Predrag Bogojević (Janko Popović Volarić) was a respectable restaurant owner until the war, but suddenly his Serbian origin in the new Croatian state became a problem: he paid protection to prison guards in vain, other prisoners used every opportunity to make a living, and his family renounced for reckless adultery. Saleswomen Dijana Marić (Ksenija Marinković) and Sara Rogoz (Sandra Lončarić Tankosić) realized that they could not live on a salary in a supermarket, so when they already live in a society where everyone steals, they also decided to rob the post office - unfortunately, an amateur attempt cost is high: freedom. The successful Zagreb Roma (Aleksandar Cvjetković) became friend with Martin, but the skinheads started harassing him and he took revenge on them, which cost him dearly.

The series will surely provoke fierce controversy because the opening of graves is actually a metaphor for digging through the cancerous wounds of Croatian society. Some of the scenes are embarrassingly explicit, such as the one showing how police beatings have not changed at all since the socialist era. It reveals the corruption of politicians, the connection between the media and the government, shameless enrichment, xenophobia, and much more.

If that seems intriguing enough to you, start watching a series that seems to have nothing to do with our television products: hopefully, it won’t be the only one of its kind.

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