Zagreb, World War II. Austrian nurse Diana Budisavljevic, married to Serb doctor Julije Budisavljević, hears of thousands of Serb children being held in concentration camps by the Ustasha and Nazi dictatorships. While the Jewish inmates receive help from the Jewish community, the Serb children receive nothing. Diana thus decides to establish her own association to give food, medicine and clothing to Serb children in the Lobor-Grad camp. Various people give donations in her apartment. She organizes that 10,000 malnourished children are relocated from the concentration camp to Zagreb, where they are temporarily adopted by families, and she keeps a record of all the names so that the children can be reunited with their parents after the war. However, after the war, the new Communist dictatorship despises her because she is an Austrian, and confiscates her records with the names, which were never found afterwards.
Docudrama "The Diary of Diana B" is an intruiging film adaptation of the "rediscovered" diary of the forgotten humanitarian Diana Budisavljevic who saved 10,000 Serb children from the concentration camps during World War II, and the director Dana Budisavljevic (related to her through Diana's husband Julije Budisavljevic) crafts an honest, noble, respectful, emotional, yet also objective depiction of this historical episode. The movie is divided in two parts: one half is a narrative film with actors playing these roles; the other is a documentary interviewing four child survivors from the concentration camps, now old people. This blend works somewhat, though the narrative part feels strangely routine, schematic, bland and mechanical, almost as a PowerPoint presentation, lacking some drama or passion. The testimonies of the survivors have some harrowing moments: for instance, a woman recalls how she and another kid would routinely receive five or six beans in their bowl for lunch, and would argue if one of them got one bean more than the other one. Another survivor recalls how he never found out when or where he was born, nor who his parents were. A lot is done to depict how Diana not only had to go through political, but also through bureaucratic obstacles as none of the institutions could fathom that someone was willing to help these Serb children, yet it also slyly implies how all dictatorships are rotten and detrimental to humankind (during World War II, Diana was despised by the Nazis for being a humanitarian, while after the war she was depised by the Communists for being an Austrian). "The Diary of Diana B" is more relevant humanistically-thematically than cinematically, yet it still offers a valuable reconstruction of an altruistic deed.
Grade:++
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