Film Fact: Serbia

To celebrate the weird and wonderful Eurovision Song Contest, we present weird and wonderful film facts about this year's finalist countries.

Serbia can certainly boast its fair share of contributions to international cinema—the films of Emir Kusturica and Goran Paskaljević, actors like Rade Šerbedžija and Danilo Stojković—but perhaps the most influential, though unknown, was one Dušan Popov a Serbian double-agent who worked both for Britain's MI5 (where he wascodenamed 'Agent Tricycle') and Germany's Abwehr (where he was known only as 'Ivan'). In the course of his WWII adventures, Popov crossed paths with no less than Ian Fleming himself, at the time, working for British naval intelligence. Fleming followed the spy to Portugal and, at the Estoril Casino, outside Lisbon, was impressed with his steely resolve. The image of the impeccably-dressed Serb making a bet of $40,000 American dollars at a baccarat table (more than half-a-million in today's terms), simply in order to cause a rival to withdraw, so impressed Fleming that he used it as the basis for his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. And thus a legend was born