by Thinus Ferreira
South African television and an M-Net Original is going to global with the big-budget local series Trackers that was on M-Net last year that is getting its debut on HBO's Cinemax channel.
Trackers, an adaptation of the internationally acclaimed author Deon Meyer's crime novel that was filmed entirely in South Africa, will make its debut on WarnerMedia's Cinemax today, 5 June 2020.
Trackers, an international co-production between M-Net, Cinemax and Germany's ZDF, and produced by Three River Fiction and Scene23, was adapted for television by Robert Thorogood with cinematography by Ivan Strasburg and was broadcast on M-Net (DStv 101) since October 2020.
Mzansi Magic (Dstv 161) followed since April 2020, and now Trackers is making its debut on Cinemax.
The 6-episode Trackers interweaves three different story strands into an action-packed thriller that covers the length and breadth of South Africa, explosively colliding in Cape Town in a violent conspiracy involving organized crime, smuggled diamonds, state security, black rhinos, the CIA and an international terrorist plot.
In Trackers agents of the Presidential Bureau of Intelligence (PBI) are doing surveillance of a small group of Islamic radicals known as "the Committee" who are suspected of trying to secretly import a weapon of mass destruction into South Africa.
To pay for their operation, the Committee has hired a local mob boss to steal a cache of diamonds being smuggled in from Zimbabwe, but all hell breaks loose when the would-be hijackers find more - and less - than what they had expected.
The Trackers cast includes James Gracie, Rolanda Marais, Ed Stoppard, Sandi Schultz, Brendon Daniels, Trix Vivier, Thapelo Mokoena, and Sisanda Henna and is executive produced by Cobus van den Berg, Tim Theron, Jonathan Drake, Robert Thorogood and Deon Meyer; with Steve Maher as executive creative producer, Rebecca Fuller-Campbell as series producer and directed by the Finnish director Jyri Kähönen.
