Beta Film has acquired international distribution rights to “I Know Your Soul,” a new series from Oscar nominee Jasmila Žbanić (“Quo Vadis, Aida?”) that premieres Out of Competition next month at the Venice Film Festival.
The six-episode limited series is led by European Film Award-winning actress Jasna Đuričić, who plays Nevena Murtezic, a prosecutor in the process of divorce and single mother to a teenage son. The case of an adolescent’s suicide triggers an avalanche of events in her professional and private life, as she finds it increasingly difficult to balance the needs of her son, Dino (Lazar Dragojević), with a job that is under constant public and political pressure.
The Bosnian drama is among a growing slate of prestige productions Beta is selling from Eastern Europe as part of the company’s initiative to co-finance and co-produce more projects in the Central and East European region, including the Serbian supernatural drama “Block 27” and the Czech crime series “Ultimatum.” The series is produced by Deblokada and BH Content Lab for BH Telecom.
“I Know Your Soul” is created by Žbanić and Damir Ibrahimović and directed by Alen Drjević and Nermin Hamzagić. The show reunites Žbanić with Đuričić, who won critical acclaim for her performance in “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” which premiered in Venice in 2020 and would go on to make the Oscar shortlist for the best international feature.
The harrowing film depicted the mass killing of some 8,000 civilians — mostly Muslim men and boys — in Srebrenica, a town that was considered a “safe area” amid the wider, raging conflict of the Bosnian War in the 1990s. The worst act of mass killing on European soil since World War II, the massacre was perpetrated while U.N. peacekeepers stood idly by and was later deemed a genocide.
Đuričić won a European Film Award for her portrayal of a U.N. translator in Srebrenica desperately trying to save her family from the coming violence.
Žbanić’s first film, “Grbavica: Land of My Dreams,” about a widowed woman and her young daughter struggling to scrape by in war-ravaged Sarajevo, won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2006.
