Dubina dva (Depth Two), Ognjen Glavonic, Serbia, 2016, 80'
One historical event, two films: a documentary with testimony from survivors and warmongers, and a fiction based on what happened. By way of a prologue to Teret (The Load, Ognjen Glavonic, Serbia, 2018), due to be screened at the Human Rights Film Festival, we go back to the documentary filmed by the same director two years prior and which served as his record of the events.
Dubina Dva is the name of a covert operation carried out in 1999 while NATO was bombing Yugoslavia. A half-submerged truck turns up on the banks of the Danube, on the border with Romania. A true horror awaits inside: 53 bodies. No one asked questions about any of them. The documentary compiles the oral testimonies from those involved in the massacre, given some time later in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Images provide a record of the places where the horror unfolded: fields, roads, junctions, forests, wastelands, motorways... These no man's lands, filmed years after the war, take on a new and sinister meaning underneath the voices of those involved in the story. Little by little, as though it were an experimental thriller, we discover the truth of the Suvu Reka massacre: the moment when Serbian police rounded up a group of Kosovan villagers and forced them into the back of the truck.
At once a reconstruction of a place and a crime and a radical memory exercise, this documentary completes the session that follows a few days later in the Festival.
Dubina dva (Depth Two), Ognjen Glavonic, Serbia, 2016, 80'