Director: Pedrag Antonijevic
Screenplay: Natasa Drakulic
Cast: Biljana Cekic, Anja Stanic, Zlatan Vidovic, Luka Saranovic, Jakov Saranovic, Simon Saranovic, Sandra Ljubojevic, Nikola Radulj, Rajko Lukac, Vesna Kljajic Ristovic, Nikolina Friganovic, Igor Dordevic, Natasa Ninkovic, Marko Pipic
Runtime: 130 minutes
Rated R
Movies about the Holocaust are difficult. Difficult to make, difficult to market, and difficult to watch. While making it, the filmmakers have to be conscious of the tone and make sure the story isn’t too bleak or too happy, one making it hard to recommend and the other seems like mockery. While marketing it, a studio has to be careful to make the point that the film is serious but it can’t look too depressing or people won’t want to watch it. Then when watching, the horrors depicted on screen make the film difficult to process and stomach churning.
Dara of Jasenovac, the new film from Serbian director Pedrag Antonijevic and Serbia’s official entry to the Academy Awards for the Best International Film, is a Holocaust film like many others, yet also entierly unique. The story follows Dara, a 10-year-old Serbian girl. Dara is sent to the Croatian Concentration Camp Complex called Jasenovac. It follows the tradition of showing the multitude of brutal and horrific ways these innocent people were treated in these camps. What is unique about it is that it is the only film to detail this complex that was the only concentration camp in WWII that was not started or operated by the Nazis. This was fully under the control of the fascist Ustasha regime, which was aligned with Nazi Germany.
The film starts very broad, with a shot of a moderate group of people being marched down a dirt road, obviously against their will. Over time, the film focuses on Dara and she emerges as the primary character. This approach of making the story effectively zoom in on one of characters helps the film feel universal, but specific at the same time. This could be any survivor’s story, but by focusing on Dara instead of making the film about the entire group of prisoners, actor/writer Natasa Drakulic zeroes in on an emotional core and uses that to tell her story.
The bulk of the story centers on Dara (excellently played by newcomer Biljana Cekic) trying to care for and stay together with her youngest brother, almost 2-year-old Bude (Simon Saranovic). Between his being hungry and then ill, Dara fights to keep him with her after tragedy separates the family. Her burden is amplified when her aunt asks her to look after her boys when she’s ‘sent to work in Germany’. This struggle is aided and hindered by fellow prisoners, guards and (for lack of a better word) collaborators. Dara doesn’t face this difficult time completely alone, she has help, but she must make the big decisions for herself.
The surrounding story tells of the prison complex of Jasenovac, and portrays the brutality and evil that ran it. When we are not seeing Dara struggling, we see other prisoners forced to play games that are single elimination: you lose, you die. Antonijevic takes great pains to detail, as much as possible, the horrifying ways that the Serbs and other prisoners were treated. Those sequences feel familiar, we’ve seen ones like it in other prison camp films, but they’re also kind of new. Sadistic games are played, like musical chairs, each round ending with one less chair and one less player. They are reminiscent of the bursts of violence in Pan’s Labyrinth (I'm thinking specifically the bottle situation early in that film) in their casual cruelty. The way the murders and murderers are presented are in line with most other fascist characters, but that lends an air of congruity with the other death camp films of note.
The only thing that seems out of place in the film is the representation of the dead walking through snow to wait in a boxcar until it’s all over, apparently. It's an odd visual that first appears out of the blue and doesn’t have the emotional hook that the director was going for. It feels like it was designed solely to get that last shot, which I will not disclose here, and that makes it a little too calculated. That and the occasions of digitally added blood spurts that look very much like digitally added blood spurts are the only drawbacks and these are only minor quibbles that do not take away from the impact of the story.
Dara of Jasenovac does tend to fall on the bleaker side (there are no elements of Life is Beautiful or Jacob the Liar here), but that bleakness helps the film earn its brighter moments and illustrates hope survives even in the face of immense tragedy. All of the suffering that is endured pays off in a very emotional ending that really makes you feel like things might just work out for Dara. She never loses hope or determination to keep what remained of her family together. Dara of Jasenovac is a gut-wrenching story that, while difficult to watch, was imperative to tell.