ŽIVI I MRTVI

The film relates two parallel stories linked by the scene of events and the context of war but separated by an interval of half a century. The first strand plays in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1989. Six Croatian soldiers find themselves cut off from the rest of their division after the outbreak of the Bosnian-Croatian conflict. In order to reach the next position they have to cross rough mountain terrain and the “valley of death”. The soldier Tomo is at the centre of this first story. The second strand, playing in the same mountain region during World War II, follows a group of Croation and Muslim combatants (“Domobrani”) who, led by two Ustase commanders, are pursuing a group of partisans who have taken refuge there after a skirmish. This story revolves round Martin, a “Domobran” who is also Tomo’s grandfather. In the course of the film, the two strands complement each other and ultimately dovetail, after a number of tragic occurrences, in a mysterious graveyard. In the manner of a true anti-war film, this adaptation of the eponymous novel by Josip Mlakić depicts, with impressive images and psychological portraits, the tragic truth that all wars are principally the same, whatever side one’s fighting on. Even the living are dead by the end – or else simply die first.