Serbian Director Threatens US Lawsuit over WWII Film Review

Predrag 'Gaga' Antonijevic, director and producer of 'Dara of Jasenovac', Serbia's entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 2021 Oscars, which deals with crimes committed at the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, said on Sunday that he intends to sue the Los Angeles Times for denying war crimes committed against Serbs at the WWII camp.

"This is no longer a question of film and criticism, but it represents a complete denial of the genocide committed against Serbs during the Independent State of Croatia and a serious insult to all the victims," Antonijevic told the Nova.rs website.

In the Los Angeles Times review on February 4, Robert Abele claimed that the "veneer of historical reality is thin" in Antonijevic's film.

Abele wrote that although the fascist Ustasa movement that ran the WWII-era Independent State of Croatia was "a nightmarish puppet regime of the Axis powers" and the Jasenovac concentration camp was "one more hell on Earth for Jews", Antonijevic appears to be using his film to score political points amid a "longstanding regional feud" between Serbs and Croats.

"What director Antonijevic's epic of barbarism and sentimentality wants to drive home is that the annihilation of ethnic Serbs was the real focus [of the Jasenovac camp], and that children got their own camp," he said.

The Los Angeles Times review came two weeks after an article in US entertainment business magazine Variety described 'Dara of Jasenovac' as "Serbian nationalist propaganda" and said that it displays "unconcealed anti-Croatian, anti-Catholic nativism".

"Variety at least wrote that everything is true, but that the film is supposedly propaganda, although I don't know how...