The Day That Shook the World (Serbo-Croatian: Sarajevski atentat, lit. The Sarajevo Assassination) is a 1975 Czechoslovak-Yugoslav-German co-production film directed by Veljko Bulajić, starring Christopher Plummer and Florinda Bolkan. The film is about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in 1914 and the immediate aftermath that led to the outbreak of World War I.
When the only surviving heir to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was killed by Gavrilo Princip, a Yugoslav nationalist, on 28 June 1914, his death set in motion a chain of events that resulted in the First World War. The movie chronicles the events surrounding that death and its aftermath. The assassination gave the Germans and Austrians reason to fear that the Russian Empire was actively fomenting unrest in the Balkans, since Serbia was a bone of contention throughout the region.
Contents
Cast
Christopher Plummer as Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Florinda Bolkan as Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg
Maximilian Schell as Đuro Šarac
Irfan Mensur as Gavrilo Princip
Radoš Bajić as Nedeljko Čabrinović
Ivan Vyskočil as Mehmed Mehmedbašić
Libuše Šafránková as Yelena
Otomar Korbelář as Franz Joseph I of Austria
Wilhelm Koch-Hooge as Franz Conrad
Jiří Holý as Erich von Merizzi
Nelly Gaierová as Countess Langus
Jiří Kodet as Morsley
Release
The film was released to cinemas on October 31, 1975. In addition to Yugoslavia, it was released to Bulgaria, West Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, USSR, Algeria, Lebanon, India, Nepal, Albania, and China. It was released to the United States two years later.
On January 6, 2011, it was released on DVD.
Awards
The film won one award at the 1976 San Sebastián International Film Festival in the Special Mention category. The film was also selected as the Yugoslav entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 48th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. The film also earned director Veljko Bulajic a Silver Arena award at the 1976 Yugoslav National Film Awards (today known as the Pula Film Festival).