Jasenovac concentration camp, World War II. Dara Ilić (10), her two brothers and mother are among numerous Serbs who are brought to the camp run by the Nazi-aligned Ustasha dictatorship. The Ustasha guards kill Serb inmates, while Dara's dad is assigned to bury the corpses. After her mother and older brother are killed, Dara and her 2-year old brother are among the children who are brought to the Stara Gradiška camp. There the women work on the farm, under the supervision of Mileva, while the Catholic nuns indoctrinate children to convert them into Croats. Diana Budisavljević, head of a humanitarian association, arrives from Zagreb to transfer children to safety. Dara's brother is sick and thus under threat of being killed, but is covertly smuggled to Diana's van for adoption. As the van leaves, Dara runs after it. An Ustasha woman shoots at her, but misses, so Dara boards the van are leaves with her brother.
The first narrative film about the Jasenovac concentration camp is a film that should have been made since it is an important contribution for the genocide studies, and thus one wishes that it had been better. "Dara of Jasenovac" chronicles the Ustashe genocide of Serbs through the crimes of persecution, murder, torture, looting, unlawful confinement and forced labor in Jasenovac in the first 45 minutes, after which it switches to the Stara Gradiska concentration camp for women and children, and some situations are honest, genuine and emotional, but the movie suffers from several flaws, mostly in the form of a few heavy-handed solutions and scenes of propaganda. It is also problematic that the title heroine, the 10-year old girl Dara (very good Biljana Cekic) appears in only some 30 minutes of the two-hours of running time. The opening act has weight: it shows hundreds of Serb civilians marching across a meadow, led by Ustashe at gunpoint, while one Serb woman makes eye contact with a Croat woman working on the field, secretly sneaks away from the column, gives her own baby to her, and then returns back to the column (touching, but a bit illogical since she could have simply stayed there in the bushes as nobody had seen her, instead of returning back). As the train arrives on the bridge, the Jasenovac inmates, who are throwing corpses into the Sava river, comment cynically: "Look, more work for us." - "Tomorrow you will throw me like that." - "Just work, maybe you will live longer."
The depiction of the state of things inside Jasenovac is well done—as the concertation camp lacked any machinery, all the people were killed one by one, with several shocking scenes—though the director Predrag Antonijevic cannot resist not to insert a few pretentious bits. One sequence is particularly badly done: during the game of musical chairs for the inmates, where the last one is killed, there is a stupid moment of an Ustasha man getting so aroused that he goes to have sex with an Ustasha woman in a car; an Ustasha shoots Dara's mother while holding an apple in his mouth; whereas a Nazi is shown so disgusted by the killings that he throws up—contrived, as if their perversion is not obvious enough, so Antonijevic has to exaggerate even more by inventing things not based on historical records. These banal "additions" reduce the film's feeling of honesty. Two best moments: Dara's father is assigned to bury corpses from Jasenovac on the field, and is shocked to see his dead wife and son among the corpses, which is emotional and devastating; the other is a long speech held by an Ustasha officer, but then there is a cut to an Ustasha guard killing one of the inmates in a row in the meadow, as the words of the first one are heard off screen, talking about "rights in the country", in a good contrast between his propaganda and reality, showing how there are actually zero human rights there. Martina Kitanovic and Alisa Radakovic are surprisingly effective and memorable as the two Ustasha women. The ending is clumsy and unconvincing, full of plot holes and illogical 'saved-in-the-nick-of-time' clichés, but despite this disparate blend of honesty and manipulation, "Dara of Jasenovac" is an overall good film.
Grade:++
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