German producer NEUESUPER and Beta Film have unveiled the trailer for Blindspot Berlin, a six-part drama that reconstructs the failed police operation to infiltrate an Islamic extremist network in the months before the 2016 Berlin Christmas market attack. The series bows at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Primetime strand next week, with Beta Film handling international sales.
The footage, which THR is debuting exclusively, sets out the case as investigators built it: surveillance on the circle around the Salafist preacher Abu Walaa, the running of an informant sent inside the group, and a string of internal warnings about a young man on the network’s fringes that went nowhere.
That man was Anis Amri, the Tunisian who drove a truck into a crowd at the Breitscheidplatz market on Dec. 19, 2016, killing 13 people and injuring dozens. The attack triggered parliamentary inquiries in Berlin and at the federal level into how a suspect known to police and intelligence services slipped through, and remains one of the most politically sensitive cases in modern German security history.
Blindspot Berlin opens more than a year before the attack, following Berlin police officer Isra (Bayan Layla) and investigator Frank (Albrecht Schuch) as they track the network. Frank recruits Murat (Tamer Trasoglu) as a source inside the group, at considerable personal risk. Neither the Federal Criminal Police Office nor the domestic intelligence service acts on their reporting. Isra, meanwhile, is hiding a family history that could cost her her job, and Frank’s fixation on the case is eroding his marriage.
David Nawrath (Your Honor) directs and co-created the series with David Marian, with whom he also co-wrote the scripts. Schuch, a BAFTA nominee for Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front and a regular in German prestige fare including Bad Banks and Berlin Alexanderplatz, leads a cast that also features Wael Alkhatib, Jeanne Goursaud, Bernd Hölscher and Sina Martins.
Producer Simon Amberger said the central problem was how to dramatize an event whose “social, political, and personal dimensions are still being felt today — without oversimplifying, without speculating, and without losing sight of those who were directly affected.” Years of research and interviews with investigators, lawyers and survivors, he said, kept returning to gaps in the record that “have never been closed.” The series, he added, offers “a serious and considered hypothesis about how things unfolded and why they went wrong.”
Blindspot Berlin is a NEUESUPER production in co-production with ARD Degeto Film, rbb, NDR and HR. It premieres in TIFF’s Primetime strand on Sept. 13.
Check out the exclusive video below.
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