# Once Upon a Time There Was a Country (1996)

> Two black marketeers in wartime Belgrade sell weapons to the resistance and then reemerge into the 1990s Yugoslav wars, with a surreal con man at the center.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/61840

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 6
- Episode runtime: 327 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: drama, comedy, war
- Created by: Emir Kusturica
- Cast: Predrag 'Miki' Manojlović, Lazar Ristovski, Mirjana Joković, Slavko Štimac, Ernst Stötzner, Srđan 'Žika' Todorović, Mirjana Karanović, Milena Pavlović Čučilović
- TMDB rating: 8.4/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319957/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal, bittersweet, melancholic

## Synopsis

Once Upon a Time There Was a Country (1996) is a Yugoslav miniseries created by Emir Kusturica, a six-episode television version of his Palme d'Or winning film Underground. Predrag Manojlović plays Marko Dren, a slippery black marketeer who sells weapons to the Communist resistance in wartime Belgrade, and Lazar Ristovski plays his partner Petar Popara, whose friendship and romance with Marko are tested as they live well amid the chaos. Marko's surreal duplicity lifts him through the Communist Party ranks, while the pair spend a long stretch sheltering underground before resurfacing into the Yugoslavian civil wars of the 1990s, where Marko again sees opportunity. The series is a sprawling, long-form epic built from many interlocking episodes rather than a case-of-the-week format, and it runs about five and a half hours in total. Its register mixes absurdist farce, dark comedy and tragedy, with dreamlike exaggeration and bitter satire of ideology and profiteering. Fans of Underground, Kusturica's other surreal Balkan films, and black comedies like Burn After Reading will find resonance here, as will viewers drawn to sweeping historical sagas about Balkan survival.

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