Dara of Jasenovac’ Review

Isn’t it long past time that there was an honest discussion about why there are so many Holocaust films? Unquestionably some meet the challenge posed by the injunction “never forget,” but too many others exist because the market has proven that the Holocaust sells. The movies falling into this latter category trivialize as they sensationalize, fiddling on heart strings with a facile bow whose chords jump between lurid and saccharine. A subset within this group folds more troubling objectives into their cynical understanding of the market, using the Shoah to push agendas that have little to do with comprehending the unfathomable.

The film opens with families marched to the cattle cars, and 10-year-old Dara Ilić (Biljana Čekić) asking her older brother Jovo (Marko Pipić) why their Croatian neighbors aren’t also being rounded up since they look the same. The able-bodied men were taken some time earlier, leaving the children’s mother Nada (Anja Stanić Ilić) alone to look after them and her toddler son Bude. At the swastika-bedecked station, Father Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović (Vuk Kostić) weeds out the ill and