Dnevnik Diane Budisavljevic

Sad and real movie at the same time. The main actress did her acting good.

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. :-(

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.

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.

Very important story about life of a woman that risked her life to save thousand of small children in Croatia during the second World War. I like the acting and filming.

The movie left me with so many questions and I would prefer if the movie was at least 30 minuttes longer.