About Bez vedomi (The Sleepers)
Bez vedomi (international title The Sleepers) is a Czech political thriller miniseries produced by HBO Europe and first released in 2019. Set in late 1989, on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, the story follows Marie, who returns to Czechoslovakia from years of emigration in Britain together with her husband Viktor, a dissident. Almost immediately after their arrival a car accident throws their homecoming into chaos, and Marie is left trying to make sense of conflicting accounts about what truly happened.
As Marie searches for the truth, she becomes entangled in the murky world of the state security apparatus during a period when the old regime is collapsing and a new order has not yet taken shape. The series explores how intelligence services, informants, and so-called sleeper agents maneuvered during the transition, blurring the line between loyalty and betrayal. Marie cannot be certain who is telling the truth, who is being manipulated, or whether the people closest to her are who they claim to be.
Across its six episodes the show uses the historical backdrop of 1989 to examine themes of memory, complicity, and the cost of political change. Rather than presenting the fall of communism as a clean break, Bez vedomi suggests that the structures and secrets of the past continued to shape the present. The miniseries was noted for its atmospheric period detail and its ambiguous, morally complex characters, and it became one of HBO Europe's prominent Czech-language productions.
