Kritiken

The film has been handsomely produced with a lot of attention to detail, from the set design and costumes to the photography and soundscape. Rather than focusing on drab and desolate imagery as similar films have done, this one frequently presents us with atrocities taking place in bright daylight in rural landscapes which seem both too beautiful and too humble to contain them.

But despite some heavy-handed moments, it’s hard not to be struck by the horror on display, especially knowing that director Antonijević and writer Nataša Drakulić based their screenplay on survivor testimony and court transcripts, creating a “composite truth”, as Antonijević calls it.

The veneer of historical reality is thin on the baldly nativist and manipulative Serbian World War II movie “Dara of Jasenovac,” a slickly made extermination camp drama about child peril that will test the patience of even the most rigorous students of cultural representations of genocide.

Were there no contemporary context to “Dara of Jasenovac,” it would be just another unmodulated Holocaust drama using violence in the same way as any number of serial killer movies. But background is inescapable, and in this case, Serbian nationalists’ use of Jasenovac as a rallying cry for Serb victimhood through the centuries turns the film into propaganda.