Ada T
An important subject and time in history that deserves presentation on the big screen. However, this garbage ( movie critics are absolutely correct) is not worth anybody time.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
06/04/25
Full Review
Milos C
I have watched, and got uncomfortable how?'' ,so scary and realistic this movie is acting, looking ,special effects.Forgive, but never forget, RIP to all victims.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/12/25
Full Review
Audience Member
I lost a number of kin at Jasenovac. In our district, one in four were killed in WWII, by fascists, simply because we went to an Eastern Orthodox church and were therefore considered 'Serbian' by nationality. My DNA is 33% aboriginal to Croatia, my family had lived in Karlovac county, specifically, for at least the past 200 years, as far back as Ancestry.com will speculate. Still, we were driven from these lands we have always lived in, accused, in the western press, of being invading genociders. An example of one of those Really Big Lies. Operation Storm was an extinction event. I am one of the last. The culture that produced Tesla and held the border of Europe for 350 years against further Moslem colonization, is now lost in Total Diaspora, far too small and scattered for the culture to survive. We will all simply be absorbed wherever we land.
The reviews I am reading are sickening. They are accusing us of wanting this movie made simply to make Croatians and Catholics look bad. How would a Jewish Holocaust survivor talk about what's happened to his family without saying something negative about the actions of some Germans? I am very familiar with the testimonies and documentation concerning the clerical fascist state of Croatia. Are you? This movie was extremely restrained in the stories it told. For example, the musical chair scene was based on numerous testimonies, but the game was not being played by adults in reality. Little children were being forced to play it. Perhaps my family's little four-year-old Milka, who was lost in Jasenovac? Was that the last thing she experienced? She failed to find a chair and her throat was cut?
Some of the statements in these reviews are outright lies or ignorant misstatements. There WERE gypsy and Jewish prisoners in the storyline. There WERE heroic Croats. Was someone asleep? Were they so intent on seeing bias they exerted some of their own? As someone told me, we have the misfortune that the people who have hated us and abused us behaved so badly that when we try to report on it, people think WE'RE deranged.
We survivors have waited 70 years for a beautifully made, international feature film, with a moving orchestral soundtrack and wonderful acting to be made telling the world the truth about what happened to us, which we are not over yet. Human beings NEVER recover from this kind of trauma in that short period of time. I just watched a movie last week about the sufferings of Koreans at the hands of Japanese in a labor camp, "Battleship Island." It was wonderful. I see no one complaining that it's just anti-Japanese propaganda. You will often hear Chinese and Korean people say that they may be optimistic about current relations with the Japanese, but they will NEVER forget what happened. Nobody can ever forget when things like this happen. No human beings can.
For everyone else in the world, it seems, it is understood that people want respectful attention for what has happened to them, and a chance to tell the story of their brave struggle against such evil. But that principle has never been applied to us. Not even after 70 years will there be a respectful moment where we can feel like we matter. What's happened to us is as bad as it gets, anywhere, ever, and no one knows, no one cares. No one wants to know.
Some say 80% of Croatia was Eastern Orthodox at the beginning of the 19th century. By mid-20th century that was down to 15% after one in four of us had been destroyed as sadistically as it gets. I wonder if it just became expedient to the Austro-Hungarian empire to influence the people to become western, instead of eastern, identified. From there flowed one of the most horrendous cultural, psychological, homicidal genocide stories ever. It's horrible what happens to people when you convince them they're inferior and need to become what you want them to be. And then promote them based on how deeply they will betray their (former) own. The 'Father of the Croatian Nation' was half Serb. He went all the way to the top, by being the first to call for the extermination of the subhuman Serbs. His own mother.
It's sickening, in general, the amount of propaganda the West has been heaping on the Serbs since the 90s. The West, by the way, gained control over strategically invaluable land -- the easiest land route between Europe and the Middle East -- the year after Yugoslavia was destroyed. Where does that route run? Through Serbia, Kosovo to be specific. The largest US military base in Europe now sits in that thoroughfare. I've just given you a hint on the reason the word for 'divide and conquer' is 'balkanization.' Just remember the words, 'strategic military location' and all the complexities of the Balkans become very simple. It's not us who are crazy, but all the avaricious superpowers throughout history trying to make us so.
Yes, there are some corrupt politics going on with this movie. They are in regard to the political agendas of the powerful who think they can write the postscript to anyone's story they please. And then, of course, there are the rumors that a PR firm in Los Angeles under contract with the government of Croatia, paid off some of those prestigious reviewers to deliver THEIR propaganda. Just a rumor. Of course, just a rumor.
And the reviewer who accused the movie of being made by a nationalistic Serbian government? When you ask any Serbs, they'll tell you their government is a puppet of the West. How can there be such a disconnect?
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Great movie! Worth of watching. Touching story depicting the suffering of human beings from the hands of the other human beings. It makes one ask him/herself how was this possible. The movie prompts to thinking and introspection.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
Full Review
greg r
I have studied the Holocaust for years. Traveled to Auschwitz/Birkenau. Other camps. I am neither Serb nor Croat. German nor Jew. This movie sucks. Period. Sucks. I went in thinking the reviews against it were a Hollywood alliance because of the atrocities of Serbs in my lifetime. It is not. The movie is over the top and just bad. Poorly written, clearly a hit piece, and written with an anger no different than the perpetrators of the atrocities this movie details. How this has the high audience rating I have no idea. This is garbage. The critics are correct. Even if some are racially biased. I turned it off almost an hour before the end. So many better movies about the Holocaust. Important movies.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A visually strong film that portrays a little known part of the Holocaust that raged in Europe in WWII. During the war, the Nazis helped establish the Independent State of Croatia in 1941 which was run by the Croatian Ustasha fascist regime. Fanatically loyal to Hitler and his racial theories, they created death camps, the largest of which was called Jasenovac. The random violence and sick games and terror plays out at times as in Schindler's List when the German Commander Amon Goth toyed with his victims. In this film the Ustasha are nameless guards and overseers with no limits to their evil. The acting is medicore and predictable at times but maybe something is lost in the translation to subtitles. Overall, a good film and one that is historically very accurate and a solid contribution to the Holocaust genre. I believe also probably the only feature film about the Jasenovac camp and the crimes committed against Croatia's minority Serbs and Jews in WWII.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
Full Review
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