Good movie. Suggests that the assignation of the arch duke was a conspiracy of Austria and Germany not Serbia. The arch duke was a problem to the the Austrian elite and military as he was against a war against a war with Serbia and that he was going to upend the power control of the elite in Austro-Hungaria when Emperor (e.g. his wife would be empress and his children would inherit the throne). This also included that Empire would become a constitutional monarchy like Britain and that all nationalities would have equal power in the empire. He also didn't want war with Serbia as he believed that his military was needed to maintain control and repress civil war in the empire, not war with a neighbor country . The Austrian Military and power elite wanted otherwise and in a conspiracy with Germany plotted to murder him which they could then blame on Serbia and a pretense to start a war.

We all know what happened that awful day in July 1914 from the history books, but what if the truth was different? This movie creates a different look at the events leading up to the first world war and in a plausible way I must say. It makes you wonder" , maybe he was right after all....Politics back then could be as dirty as they have become in our modern time, that becomes very clear. Racism was exploding as well as the urge to "clean" countries completely. Against this background a compelling story is told in the perfect setting , as gloomy as can be, a forecasting shadow of what the world could expect and would endure.The burden the main character carries, so well, is the burden the world carried and would change it forever.Would I recommend this movie ? YesWould I watch it again? YesWell done!

Over all a slick production about things almost no one has any knowledge about any more. I knew about the Archduke being assassinated in Sarajevo but no details... did not know the invasion of Serbia was the casus belli of WWI. The film was a tad heavy on the digital enhancement side but not too bad.I have several pet peeves with the story. The hero is Jew turned Christian DA type who is charged with investigating the Archduke's assassination. There was the dose of ugly anti-semitism.... is there nothing that can be produced with out this particular moral lesson? It dilutes the story line...which is a tad melodramatic and unbelievable anyway. To wit=The real cause for the Austro-Hungarian interest in Serbia was a cabal of greedy capitalists who wanted a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad that had to go through Serbia...sort of like the Keystone Pipeline idea. This lefty fodder is simply not likely as Baghdad in 1914 would have had all the economic interest of dry camel dung. Oil was not discovered until 1927. Also Serbia had been involved in numerous Balkan wars trying to enlarge its territory and was anti Austro-Hungarian pro Russian from 1903 on... it was anything but an innocent bystander. So it is a historical ignorant plot.Then there is the yuppie love angle...beautiful Serbian suffragette heiress (married no less) is the romantic interest of the Jewish DA.Wash out the PC stuff and get a more historically accurate motive and it would have been dramatically better.

"Sarajevo" is an Austrian/Czech co-production from 2014 that deals with a crucial event on its 100th anniversary. It is a 95-minute movie in the German language that came out the very same year that director Prochaska and writer Ambrosch made the pretty well-known western movie "Das finstere Tal". But back to this one here: It is a small screen release and the title already gives away that there is a historic context to it because Sarajevo is of course the place where it all started over a century ago in terms of World War I. On a completely unrelated note, recently, the film got a bit of a boost because it got picked up on Netflix. And this movie once again confirmed for me that I have much more interest in World War II than World War I. The problem wasn't at all here that there was no war action, but it dealt a lot more with the interrogations of the people responsible for the shooting of the Austrian heir to the throne. The cast includes a handful names that German film buffs will probably recognize, such as Heino Ferch, Edin Hasanovic and Erwin Steinhauer perhaps too. The film is very sterile and bleak and it's probably not that great for younger audiences because I did not feel it delivered too much in the historic context and there are relatively cruel references, not just about the assassination, but also about executions. So yeah, all in all, the film's dialogues were not good enough for me personally to work as a mostly dialogue-driven film for almost 100 minutes. I personally give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.