This has the most powerful last two seconds I can ever remember. Few filmmakers know how to start a film; this is not often noted because there are so many prefab devices. But far fewer know how to finish. This is truly, truly powerful and if you can see it I urge you to.The shape of this has two characteristics, both handled well.The most obvious is the fugue structure. We see certain scenes over and over again, each time with new information. At the same time, new information is provided by new scenes. There are no radical narrative shifts of the kind normally called "twists." But the thing does move about as far as it is possible. Motives are revealed to be different than assumed. Characters emerge from darknesses that you see them create. Time has a different meaning than usual: all the movement stays in one place. It is a narrative structure that must be very difficult to judge from the few successes. By itself, that accretive stationary motion of narrative would be fulfilling. But here it is turned to a specific purpose. The camera flows in ways not normal: more fluid. When this happens, we want to associate it with a relationship. With dePalma for instance, that relationship is directly with the viewer. With Kar Wai Wong it is with the atmosphere. Kurosawa with the canvas. Here, we are anchored by what parents see and children reflect. As I am not personally involved in the centuries-old Serb-Croat animosity, it may be easier for me to see the different colors of siblings here, and how they are placed to make this perspective have power.You may want to watch this a couple times to pay attention to an interesting technique. We see several scenes over and over. Only a few times do we see the same exact shot. Usually, the setup is subtly different. Many times, the eye flows from not only a different direction but with a different curiosity. Sometimes the lighting varies as well — particularly in the all- important bar festooned with American movie posters.Really. The last image in its context will change you forever. This film matters.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

'Svjedoci' comes from a school of cinema that is very little known in the world excepting the films of Emir Kusturica. It's only a decade since the cannons went silent and the former Yugoslavia tries to cope with its new existence, broken into several national states, and tries to make some sense out of the facts that make no sense - the absurd violence that turned neighbors into war criminals, that separated destinies on the lines of religion and nationalist ambitions.The film has certain cinematographic quality. The techniques of retelling the same story from the perspective of different characters while progressing by a bit the action each time the story is told anew may not be completely original but is well mastered. The story turns around the murder of a Serbian profiteer by a group of three Croatian soldiers and by the efforts of a journalist and her war-crippled husband to reveal the truth and save the life of the kid daughter of the victim, the sole witness of the murder. It is very well acted by a team of expressive and well-chosen actors who provide individual characterization to each of the characters who seem to live a doomed and gray life, full of fear and resignation under the permanent threat of war and death. Crime story and war drama mix while the color pallet reflects exactly the atmosphere, dull tones, permanently cloudy and pressing skies, when it does not rain. Only in the allegoric but too much out of the mood ending colors change - some hope you would say, but this is so unfit with the rest of the film that it almost tells the viewer 'look, the director was or felt obliged to stick it to his true film, but he did not really mean it'.Yes, it's too close and to near in time for the wounds to heal. time will eventually make its effect, and until then we can expect more films to come from this troubled and lesser integrated area of Europe.

Civil War makes criminals out of neighbors and murderers out of soldiers. These are well known truths: painfully familiar lessons from the recent Balkan civil wars and now horribly visible in the Iraqi slaughter of Sunni and Shia. But there are always a few rare souls who will seek the same justice for all, whatever their own tragic hardships, whatever the added burden such moral commitment may bring. This remarkable war movie about the recent Serbo- Croatian War explores two such persons, living in a world of utter moral chaos. What is so special about them? Can we fathom their motivations?When so many act out of greed, vengeance, ethnic hatred, it is hard to explain why a few refuse to do so. If we are all witnesses to atrocities in such situations, we are also all implicated in them. But how can persons who are caught up in the unmitigated horrors of a brutal, bloody civil war find the moral resources to resist such degradation, whatever the consequences to themselves?

Film Svjedoci (Witnesses) by Vinko Brešan is from Croatia. Brešan has won countless prizes and awards in his own country, and with Svjedoci he has been nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film. Already during production, the movie triggered a fierce debate in Croatia: set against the war in Yugoslavia, this young director portrays the fatal psychological impacts of war and violence in three parallel tales. The film is based on motifs from the bestseller The Plaster Sheep by Jurica Pavicic; which was inspired by a true story from 1991 when a group of Croatian soldiers brutally killed a Serbian family. Witnesses consists of three stories, each beginning at the same moment –the moment of murder investigation, and each story gives a new point of view of what actually happened.The film focuses on the idea of losing your soul in a war. Even during production, some of the more conservative town—councilors and some war veterans' organizations protested because of the topic of this film. The film has also been publicly cried out against, because one of the main characters is played by a popular Serbian actress Mirjana Karanovic. Recommendations to observe: First scene (lasting, photography, and exterior). All blow-ups and actors face expressions. Bad point: "Happy" and heroic end of the movie