June 28th marks the anniversary of the assassination in Sarajevo, and on that day, the world’s largest streaming service Netflix will begin offering the Serbian feature-length documentary The Long Road to War directed by Miloš Škundrić, the production company Paradox Film from Belgrade has announced.
The Long Road to War is the first documentary film from Serbia to be released on Netflix and the Serbian film with the largest distribution on this film platform so far. The film will be available in 30 European countries, that is, to an audience of almost 70 million Netflix subscribers. The following countries are concerned: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Croatia, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Hungary, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain.
Created between 2014 and 2018, The Long Road to War is the first documentary film in the world that has as its subject one of the most important questions of modern world history, namely why and how World War One happened. With the help of the world’s most eminent historians and the use of film and documentary archival material from the Yugoslav Cinematheque and 15 other world archives, this “suspenseful political thriller” follows the political events in Europe from the end of the 19th century to the July crisis of 1914 and tells how the war planned and prepared years before the Sarajevo assassination.
The film was produced with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia and Film Center Serbia. The producer, screenwriter and director of the film is Miloš Škundrić. The film features: John C. G. Rohl, Hew Strachan, Georges-Henri Soutou, Oleg Ayrapetov, Lothar Hobelt, Annika Mombauer, Dominique Lieven, Jean-Paul Bled, Alan Sked, Stig Forster and the late Dušan Bataković.
The Long Road to War has been awarded at international festivals and screened on all continents, including the University of Tokyo and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.
The producer and director of the film would like to thank the sales agents in the Netherlands and Sweden and especially Film Center Serbia, without whom the distribution of this film on Netflix would not have happened.