Croatian (smaller parts in Serbian, Slovene, English and Russian)
Četverored is 1999 Croatian drama film directed by Jakov Sedlar. Based on the novel of the same name by Ivan Aralica, the plot of the film deals with the Yugoslav death march of Nazi collaborators. It was the first film to deal with the subject, formerly a taboo topic under the Communist government. Četverored was aired on television only a week after its theatrical release in Zagreb, in what was widely characterised as an electoral ploy to support the ruling Croatian Democratic Union, which subsequently lost the elections.[1]
Četverored was the last film role of Ena Begović before her death in a car accident in August 2000.[2]
Content
A chronicle of the suffering of Croats in Bleiburški polje and on the Way of the Cross, which the detainees passed through after the end of the war. The film shows the atmosphere in Zagreb before the arrival of the partisans and focuses on the fate of a group of HNK actors who decide to go into exile with parts of the defeated army. Their fates intertwine with the fates of soldiers and civilians on the way to Bleiburg, following the ever-increasing uncertainty into which they go, the complete anarchy that follows the retreat and the cruel confrontations that occur between individual military leaders blinded by hatred and defeat. In the second part of the chronicle, after the surrender and capture on the Bleiburg field, the refugees go through a harsh captivity on the Way of the Cross, where they are tormented by hunger and thirst, and death lurks at every step.
The Croatian Cinema Database website's entry for the movie gives the film a largely negative review, noting that screenwriter Ivan Aralica and director Jakov Sedlar "turned the film into an expression of caricatured intolerance towards (Serbian and Montenegrin) partisans" and that its "hate speech and utter nonsense" overshadows any potential it has.[1]
Historian Jelena Batinić writes that, despite the film's high production value and prominent Croatian actors, it "rarely rises above the level of a propaganda pamphlet with crude ethnic stereotyping" as the mostly Serb Partisans are portrayed as vicious murderers and Croat prisoners as innocent victims.[4]
Professor Dijana Jelača of Brooklyn College lists Četverored as among the post-Yugoslav nationalist revisionist films which use events of the past, reconstructing them in order to "warn generations to come" of the never-ending threats to nationhood. In this case, communism is presented as being on equal footing, if not worse, than fascism.[5] Film scholar Dino Murtic describes the film as "perhaps the most inglorious example of the cinema of self-victimisation" made during the 1990s as Yugoslavia had disintegrated.[6]
