Good Husband, Dear Son

This film, opens on a young man, perhaps 33 years old, telling of his experience in 1992. He has managed to survive by merest chance. That his chances were slim is evident from the rest of the film.

We meet the inhabitants of Ahatovici, a Muslim town a few kilometers from Sarajevo. In 1992 the town was attacked by Serbian forces. Their defenses were worn down quickly and the townspeople were taken to a men's and a women's concentration camp. The men were systematically tortured over many days, some were murdered in the camp. Eventually, the ones who were left were forced to lie down in buses "like sardines in a tin" and driven off, ostensibly to be "exchanged." Instead, the Serbs stopped the buses, threw in hand grenades and set the vehicles on fire.

Eighty-percent of the men in the town were dead at the end of it all.

The filmmaker, Heddy Honigmann, intrudes very little. After we meet the young survivor at the beginning, an older man drives through the town pointing out where men lived, their names, and whom they've left behind. We then meet the widows, sisters, grandmothers and daughters, who tell their stories in their own way. Most show little objects left behind by the men (one man's plastering tools, another's torn t-shirt); some show objects found when the men's bodies were exhumed from mass graves.

At the end, the old man walks through the cemetery, touching the individual stones and telling a little about the men that he knew--two of them his own sons.

The glimpses we have into these shattered lives is unforgettable.

The only drop of blood you see in "Good husband, dear son" is on the photograph of a young boy killed during an unknown genocide in 1992 in a little town in Bosnia, Ahatovici. His mother keeps the photograph, the only thing she has from him. The way the story of this genocide is told by Heddy Honigmann is absolutely touching and very original. There is no archive material, no detailed narration of the genocide and no boring journalistic information in this documentary. There are objects (working tools, photographs, a T-shirt, a watch, an apple tree...) which tell the story, objects cherished by the widows who lost their good husbands and dear sons. The memories these objects carry, told by these incredible strong women, make almost those boys and men alive. I never have seen a film which shows the spectator, with great poetry and delicacy and in such a profound way, the horror of what a war is and the emptiness and destruction a war lefts behind. The hole structure of a community is destroyed. The nice postman is death, the guitar-player who made the girls dance, the helpful man who brought the water to the little town, the football players, the man who loved to give advise to the ones who needed it... they are all gone and we also long for them. Great that the Sundance Channel showed "Good husband, dear son", a documentary of enormous quality.