ZOS
Keeping Peace and Breaking Story - ZOS: Zone of Separation
by Vern Smith
If the notion of keeping unwanted peace sounds bizarre, then Malcolm MacRury’s ZOS: Zone of Separation answers the call with soldiers, civilians, and lords of vice and war capable of all-out black comedy. Set presently in Jadac, a fictional town in the former Yugoslavia, the eight-part series revolves around a crumbling UN enforced ceasefire, where the last crew of peacekeepers stole everything from arms to toilets.
The ceramic thrones, stamped UN, are recovered when the UN’s top soldier, Major Hart, buys them back, careful to make equal purchases at Muslim and Christian shops. Still, seven handguns are missing, one of which is now in the possession of a supposedly unarmed male UN observer. The local Christian warlord is a strong, if corrupt, woman. And her top soldier is an ex-rock star in a Speedo: Speedo Boy. Across the street, playing vice regent is the main Muslim in charge, a white man whose bar fronts sex and drug racketeering.
“I don’t think many shows deal quite so honestly with absurdity and its messiness,” says MacRury, ZOS showrunner. “The director, Mario Azzopardi, probably came at it through the Theatre of the Absurd, and I came at it more from Monty Python.”
The hook is that when MacRury and crew mined the terrain for actual peace-war characters, they found stuff further out there than anything the writers could have come up with.
“Give you an example,” says MacRury, who’s recent work includes Deadwood, Canada-Russia ’72, and Lives of the Saint. “Speedo Boy (played by Enrico Colantoni) comes out of a true story–someone who was a nastier psychopath than our character, doing the paramilitary thing, while always hanging out in a Speedo. So we thought, ‘Oh, we have to have that,’
and we gave him a different Speedo every episode.” Sometimes Speedo Boy’s trunks display the Stars and Stripes, sometimes the Union Jack, and when he first appeared on set in Bosnia, the locals stepped closer. “This photo journalist who had been in Tuzla, Bosnia, during the war and taken photographs of terrible things, asked, ‘Who’s that?’ I told him, ‘Speedo Boy,’ and I explained the character. He said, ‘Oh, I like him. He is real.’
That sort of taught me that no matter what we smart asses are coming up with in our imaginations, the reality of war and peacekeeping is so far beyond that.”
Shot by Whizbang Films, along with Movie Central and The Movie Network, in Tuzla in late spring and early summer 2007, ZOS wrapped in Toronto that fall. Airing in late 2008, MacRury notes that geography in his black comedy is never nailed down because he didn’t want to do a historical story of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. “We wanted to take that modern European war as the jumping off point for how ethnic divisions could descend in a civilized place,” MacRury says. “We chose the former Yugoslavia because there’s some distance to it. It’s not Afghanistan or Iraq, yet it’s a forerunner because of the Muslim-Christian-Orthodox division. Even there, we generalized, called it a Muslim-Christian division, and that was intentional because the big divide in the world right now is the Islamic world and the West.”
In the uncomfortable middle, the UN is represented by the aforementioned Major Hart (Rick Roberts). A John-Wayne Albertan, Hart doesn’t drink, and makes a point of it every time Titac (Colm Meaney), the white Muslim lord of war and vice, offers one on the house. Yet by the end of episode three, Hart’s getting eccentric himself, riding around on a horse between Christians and Muslims, readying to trample the UN to get from one to the other.
About that time, the incoming Imam arrives in a VWvan blasting Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train,” breaking up the melee. Hart represents an Americanized Canadian soldier with little time for tradition, bureaucracy or even Canadianna’s sacred cow of Lester-Pearson-style peacekeeping. Hart’s foil is the lead unarmed UN observer, Captain Sean Kuzak (Michelle Nolden), an old school observer, who’s given up the gun and is trying to make a difference. Still, she’s more cynical than naďve, calling Hart out when she thinks he’s bluffing about calling in an air strike.
“She’s the anti-Hart,” MacRury says. “He’s all testosterone, and while she’s tough, she’s working in a different way to keep the lid on. She’s been through hell,” by way of a sexual assault against her – and a male French observer, Simon (Paul Doucet)–by a group of Christian men.
“What you’re seeing there is the story of two people being assaulted, then one being made to assault the other, and it’s never been done on TV. Every single relationship in the show is a very unusual love story. They are all very strange. I describe this work as a love story about hate. It’s about how they deal with love in a hateful situation.
For the complete article, please see Canadian Screenwriter Magazine
