There have been more than a few film productions about the atrocities that took place during the Holocaust, but Serbian director Predrag Antonijevic’s Dara of Jasenovac feels a little different. Selected by Serbia as its entry for this year’s Best International Film Oscar, the film tells the story of a young Serbian girl who comes face to face with the horrors inflicted by fascistic Croatian forces against Serbs and Jews in the 1940s.
Written by Natasa Drakulic, Dara of Jasenovac often feels needlessly gratuitous in its depictions of some of the most sadistic acts of violence inflicted against men, women and children as though the film takes pleasure in depicting these atrocities in every lurid detail.
During the course of the Second World War, the independent state of Croatia, which was led by the fascist Ustase government, established a concentration camp complex known as Jasenovac to exterminate ethnic Serbs, Jews and Roma people. The camp was the only operation run by non-Germans in Europe and became notorious when it transpired what had occurred within its grounds.
We first meet ten-year-old Dara (Biljana Cekic) as she is rounded up alongside her mother Nada (Alisa Radakovic) and two brothers and transported by train to Jasenovac. At the camp, Dara is left in shock after witnessing the killing of most of the men who had arrived with her earlier in a cruel game of musical chairs devised by the vicious officers who oversaw the facility; a game which sees the loser of each round eviscerated by the officer in front of his German guests.
