It is worth bearing in mind that ‘Dara’ is a feature film, not a documentary conflating events and characters for dramatic purposes is a standard part of film convention. Whether this is evidence of anti-Catholicism is another matter entirely. It is therefore unlikely his image would have been displayed next to that of Pavelic. No matter how morally slippery Stepinac was and how undeserving of sainthood, Stepinac was deeply unpopular with and fundamentally untrusted by the Ustasa regime. The portrait of Croat Archbishop Alozije Stepinac on the wall of the classroom where the nun indoctrinates the children with Ustasa ideology, hanging besides one of Ante Pavelic, the supreme leader of the state, is jarring. What the film’s producers seem to have done is to take real events from various camps and roll them all into the experience of Dara and her brother. However, while some nuns earned an unenviable reputation for their cruelty towards Serb children, most notably in the children’s camp of Jastrebarsko, no nuns were stationed at Jasenovac or Stara Gradiska. Sections of the Catholic Church in Croatia played a shameful role in the persecution of the Serbs: aside from the notorious Brother Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, who features as a supporting character in the film, numerous priests, monks and seminary students served as concentration camp guards. This, in turn, reflects the fact that the Ustasa movement saw the annihilation of the Serbs as people as its overriding nation-building objective, without which a Croatian state was unviable, it believed.Ī more reasonable criticism is that the film displays an anti-Catholic bias, an assertion presumably based on the supporting role played by a callous nun at the camp. It is true that the film focuses on the experiences of Serb women and children in the camp, but then the majority of those incarcerated in Jasenovac-Stara Gradiska were ethnic Serbs. The trumpet orchestra which accompanies a banquet for camp staff is a Roma one and obviously Roma women are present among the camp’s inmates, while two of the most important supporting characters in the film are Jewish.
Nor does the film ignore the suffering of Jews or Roma in the camp. As such, from the outset the film explicitly separates ordinary Croat citizens from the regime. On the contrary, in the very first scene, a young Croat peasant woman rescues a baby from the column of prisoners making their journey to the concentration camp, bitterly condemning the inhumanity of the Ustasa towards Serb women and children. Thereafter, the story focuses on Dara’s determination to keep the promise she made to her mother: to never allow herself to be separated from her baby brother even as he becomes increasingly weak and a succession of surrogate mother figures in the camp are killed or transferred to Germany for forced labour.ĭespite the assertions made by numerous critics, there is little evidence of a nationalist agenda in this film. Soon before arriving at the women’s and children’s section of the camp complex, Stara Gradiska, Dara’s mother and older brother are shot dead. Her father has already been incarcerated in Jasenovac by the Ustasa and is working as a gravedigger at the Gradina execution site, knowing that one day he will dig his own grave. ‘Dara of Jasenovac’ aims to convey everyday life in a concentration camp from the point of view of a ten-year-old girl, Dara Ilic, arrested along with her older brother, mother and two-year old brother Budo during the rounding-up of Serb civilians in the Kozara region by Ustasa militias and the German army. The film’s depictions of camp violence – and allegedly incest – have generated particular scorn. One critic has gone so far as to assert that the film should not have been made at all. Reviewers have dismissed the film as crude Serbian nationalist propaganda, anti-Croat and anti-Catholic score settling and historical revisionism. In August 1941, the Croatian WWII fascist Ustasa movement established the Jasenovac camp system, where over 83,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews and anti-fascists were killed as result of racial and other discriminative laws. Only a few recent Holocaust movies have provoked so many vituperative reviews or elicited so many strong opinions for reasons almost entirely divorced from the film itself.Įven before Predrag Antonijevic’s new film ‘Dara of Jasenovac’, about the Ustasa-run World War II concentration camp complex at Jasenovac in Croatia has been released in its native country – Serbia – it found itself at the centre of a welter of criticism, accused of a laundry list of transgressions by American and British film critics.