Dnevnik Diane Budisavljevic

1/3 movie, 1/3 historical footage and 1/3 interviews, the movie part is boring, the historical footage interesting, the interviews are just sad because these now old people grew up without their parents.

Now here is why i have mixed feelings, the interesting part is not the story that the director tries to tell about her relative back than but rather the childhood-memories of those foster-kids, now old people.

The movie ends telling the viewer that the record cards from back than where confiscated and never found. After the movie was in theaters another historical researcher went to the croatian state archive and found them immediately. Now i cant even tell if those old people and their sad childhood story have just been taken advantage of for this movie project or not.

My rating of 3 stars therefore is only for the interviews of these old people and theire sad childhood-story since i cant rely on the credibility of the research done for the rest of the movie. :-(

Some may not like the movie, modern day fascist especially, but story is well told, shows what Ustasa did to deserve their faith in months following 2nd WW and that many Croats were honest Catholics taking in Serb children to save them from certain death. And with the rise of fascism in the region, everyone should look what their 'idols' were doing to defenceless children!

I was surprised by the high rating of this movie. The story certainly deserves attention and there are parts that were done well, but I expected much more. Especially since I'm originally from that area.

First things first, my rating is about the movie and not about the historical event itself or the people that lived through it.

The movie is half screenplay and half documentary, while the latter is somewhat educational (real filmclips from that era where interesting to watch) the screenplay itself is monotonous and boring.

And elderly women beside me in the cinema started weeping at one point at the end where real footage of malnourished dying children was shown, hence i believe the movie should have been a 100% documentary and would have worked much better as such, the documentary parts left me with more questions that the movie doesnt answer.

As a screenplay, especially since it kind of tries to mimic older movies like "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "Schindlers List" with its filmnoir-ish look just didnt work for me, its not because of the cinematography and the blackandwhite-look which was okay but due to its static style of narration so i was happy that it was only 88mins in duration.

First of all, this film should be praised for bringing up a tragic event from not so distant history, which today remains somewhat forgotten due to various political influences. However, the way this picture deals with the said historical event is rather bland, in both the technical and, indeed, the story-telling sense.

There were only a few interesting shots in the entire film, mostly during the documentary parts when the surviving victims were interviewed. As far as the played parts go, interior scenes looked rather unauthentic, while exterior scenes were few and far in between, strongly suggesting the limited budget of this picture.

However, the greatest letdown of the film is undoubtedly the character development. To be precise, we did not witness any character development, not even from the main character Diana Budisavljevic. I believe she actually said the word "children" in literally every scene. All right, we get it, her kind efforts have saved the lives of many children, but that could not have been her one and only character trait. Dialogues were another disappointment. They regularly featured repetitive lines, while the conflicts were often resolved in a matter of seconds.