Through the Opera Glasses - 36 - ZOS - Zone of Separation

As we head towards Remembrance Day, I'd like to mention a Canadian series we just started watching on The Movie Network.


















ZOS follows 'the absurdist reality of living in a violent Zone of Separation, as well as the real costs to the peacekeepers dropped in to police it.'

A Canadian production, this series features top Canadian talent as well as featuring an international cast in the spirit of United Nations peacekeeping.

Canadians Enrico Colantoni
Lolita Davidovich
Nick Mancuso
and Nicholas Campbell

join Irish Colm Meaney
and Slovenian Larissa Drekonja
plus many Canadian actors born in other countries such as Portugal, Latvia and the actual setting for the series, the former Yugoslavia.

This is an extremely gritty series with copious amounts of swearing, blown-off body parts in living colour as well as frank depictions of battle zone prostitution and drug dealing.

It paints a transparent picture of the lunacy faced by so many Canadian peacekeepers who served in Bosnia, only to return home suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was a combination of exposure to gruesome combat conditions as well as the frustrations of trying to serve a mission with contradictory goals and chains of command.

For anyone familiar with the story of Romeo Dallaire and his doomed Rwandan peacekeeping mission, the warning signs of what was to come are woven eerily throughout this series.