Branka Trlin-Matula

Operation Barbarossa is a kids TV show, based on the novel The Mysterious Boy by Ivan Kušan. It is a story about a boy who for some time lives in the belief that he is to blame for the death of a friend, a peer, who drowned in the Sava river. In order to cover up his death, the boy takes his name (because he had just come to Zagreb when he disappeared) also goes to another school. Thus, in two shifts (before noon - afternoon), he tries to be a student in two schools and gets into many dramatic situations. The riddle is, of course, solved by Kušan's main character Koko.

After returning from the Eastern Front to their small Croatian village as veterans of the First World War, Jovan Stanisavljević (nicknamed Čaruga) and his comrade known only as Mali join forces with the gang led by a local bandit and communist revolutionary Boža The Red. After Boža is brutally murdered by law enforcement officials, Čaruga takes over as the gang's leader, turning them into a bloodthirsty troop that won't take no for an answer.

Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1890. A group of high-school students run away on an adventure that ends in scandal. The ringleader, Gusta, is expelled from school and sent to stay with his uncle in rural Turopolje. Here, a totally new world opens up to him, where the internal tragedies of the people are played out against the castle of Brezovica and a small town of wooden-framed houses. People end up in this idyllic exile because of some previous "sin" and try then to make the best of their lives there. But memories of the outside world impinge on their happiness.

The story begins in a small rural village in Ladimirevci, Eastern Croatia in 1943, where a land owner Sima is helping the Partisan Movement and the official Ustasha regime in order to save the life of his son Beneš, who is enlisted in the German army. Sima doesn't want to let his son fight for the wrong side any more, and doesn't want to give him to the Partisans either, so he hides him in his attic for the time being. The story is interwoven with episodes of Sima trying to muster a beautiful stallion - Sokol - who only answers to his son Beneš and clearly doesn't like his old man.