Vukovar Final Cut

Until 1991, Vukovar was a quiet town on the Danube in the east of Croatia where Serbians and Croats coexisted peacefully. "I didn't even know who was a Croat or a Serb," the inhabitants recollect. There was no indication that a war would erupt, but after 1991, nothing was the same ever again. That year, the Croatian war of independence began and many people died. In this film, eyewitnesses, including the wives and mothers of those who perished or remain missing to this day, soldiers, and leaders who survived the war break their silence. They talk about the slowly mounting ethnic tension, the bloody fight in which 12 Croatian policemen were killed, the formation of a volunteer army and the horrible civil war with the ensuing fall and destruction of the city. They also discuss the atrocities perpetrated in the Ovcara concentration camp. The director alternates these interviews with archival footage and images of a commemoration ceremony and the establishment of a special court of justice in 2005, which has convicted a number of perpetrators. The war clearly left deep scars in the people of Vukovar, and a decade later, they are still nowhere near being over it.