‘A World Divided’ Director Olga Chajdas Shares Trailer, Discusses Show’s Characters Nikita Khrushchev, Joan Hinton and Golda Meir: ‘We Don’t Judge These People’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Polish director Olga Chajdas continues chasing different projects as she follows Netflix’s “1983,” HBO’s “The Border” and award-winning features “Nina” and “Imago” with the new six-episode historical drama “A World Divided.”

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“A long time ago, I promised myself I wouldn’t repeat myself, ever,” she explained to Variety . “I lean towards fiction, so it seemed intriguing, but I wasn’t interested in making another documentary about World War II. We focus on real-life characters. Some are more famous than others, but we keep things subjective, trying to reflect what they were experiencing at that very time.”

She co-directed the show with Frank Devos.

“We decided to ‘split’ the characters. I ended up focusing on women, Frank focused on men, but only because these were our favorites. It was an interesting process because we work very differently. He’s read all the books and was concentrating on the factual layer. I rely on emotions and intuition.”

In “A World Divided,” decades-long narratives are split between Germany, Israel, France, the U.S., and the USSR. As World War II breaks out, six people must decide what they are fighting for: Wernher von Braun, a German rocket engineer; Hedwig Höss, the wife of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss; Joan Hinton, a nuclear physicist who worked for the Manhattan Project; Frantz Fanon, a soldier-turned-psychiatrist and philosopher; Nikita Khrushchev and Golda Meir.

“It’s kind of funny we were able to ‘tick off’ all the most important films of recent years: From ‘Oppenheimer’ to ‘The Zone of Interest.’ For me personally, going to Auschwitz and shooting in that house [Höss’ family used to live in] was a harrowing experience,” admitted Chajdas.

The protagonists – played by Max Wagner, Lara Mandoki, Denys Rodnianskyi, Meriel Hinsching, Delia Mayer and Moussa Sylla – never actually meet.

“That’s why creating the thread that connects them was the hardest part. I wouldn’t be myself if I only relied on facts, so I gave my actors a lot of space to build these characters and understand why they made these decisions. Besides Khrushchev and Meir, they weren’t directly influencing these events. Their struggle was internal.”

Created by Jan Peter and Gunnar Dedio, who also produces, the series is “an attempt to show history as what we all experience every day: a chaotic and ambivalent process of thousands of small decisions. Of mistakes, betrayals and tiny acts of heroism,” said Peter, with Dedio explaining that “colorized film sequences, shot at the time and place when these historic characters lived, are edited directly into the scenes to achieve an authenticity never seen before.”

The story of the war-torn world just felt timely, said Chajdas.

“When we were having our first talks with film funds in Luxembourg, the Poland-Belarus border crisis started. It was followed by the war in Ukraine, then by escalation in Israel and Palestine. When you look at someone like [former Prime Minister of Israel] Golda Meir, her decisions were sometimes cruel, even though they seemed right at that moment. Today, we know how complicated this conflict really is. But we don’t judge these people. Any of them.”

Having one cinematographer, Mateusz Wichłacz, helped them keep things coherent. Chajdas will soon reunite with him on the upcoming series “Kabul.” “He’s very capable,” she said, also opening up about combining fictional sequences with the archives and audio recordings of people’s memories of the war.

“With Frank, we promised ourselves we wouldn’t show images we’d already seen before. As a result, we ended up incorporating archival footage of nature. I thought it was interesting, the way it ‘observes’ human beings,” she said.

The show, the biggest project in Chajdas’ career so far, “sticks to the original languages of the characters… I’m so glad the producers agreed to do this. It adds credibility.”

“The budgets are ruthless. I don’t know if it would be possible to make a film like this now, but I’m glad there’s space for it somewhere else. We didn’t have to make artistic compromises and we really fought to have this ‘cinematic’ quality. It’s such a Polish skill, too: We know how to make a helicopter out of a matchbox.”

Sold by Looks International, “A World Divided” will be broadcast by ARTE (France), ARD/Das Erste (Germany), ORF (Austria) and CT (Czech Republic). It’s produced by Regina Bouchehri, Dedio and Birgit Rasch (LOOKSfilm), Katarzyna Ozga and Nicolas Steil (IRIS Group), Fabrice Delville (Beside Productions), Katarzyna Gromadzka (MOMAKIN) and Tomasz Morawski (HAKA Films).