A research-based essay film, but also a very personal perspective on the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its dramatic end, and its recent transformation into a few democratic nation states.
This is a story of the Croatian journalist Sinisa Glavasevic, the Croatian Radio station in Vukovar and sufferings of all Vukovar's inhabitants during the siege. At the same time this is also an archetypal story of love for one's own hometown, of integrity and responsibility of the individual who, at the hardest trials of his own conscience and responsibility, chooses to take the more difficult path, in circumstances where others - the average and the conformist - abandon ship. Sinisa decided to stay.
In 1989 a youth radio station, B-92, started up in Belgrade. It almost immediately became a symbol of the resistance to Serbian nationalism and all that Slobodan Milosevic decreed. Here, the young radio workers give a candid account of life in Belgrade throughout the years of war. They also describe their own contribution, despite all the authorities' efforts to suppress them, to the liberation of their city and their country.
History of the political events and the wars which broke the former state of Yugoslavia into several nations and caused an international political and humanitarian crisis. Using interviews with all the major participants and archive footage of the events, the series impressively performed the double feat of making understandable something which had appeared intractable and of producing 'immediate' history.
We follow Marcel Ophuls' two journeys to Sarajevo in 1993. He is starting a documentary about war correspondants. But this also becomes a reflexion about truth and life. The form consists in many interviews of mostly French and American journalists and reporters of television or newspapers.
