Josip Mlakić

Drama set in a small provincial town in post-war Croatia about 20 locals who try to understand why one of their neighbors killed himself.

25 years from the Homeland war, Croatia is far from ideal of the veterans, now disgruntled men silenced with pensions. A few war veterans are brought back together by an idea of Museum of Homeland Thanksgiving in Paromlin building in Zagreb city center.

Crne Vode, Western Bosnia, 1993. Whilst being cornered on all sides by Serbian and Bosniak forces, a small squad of Croatian soldiers stars experiancing strange phenomena in the form of spectral apparitions from the past, not realizing that, fifty years prior, a squadron of the Croatian pro-nazi milita had an equally mysterious experiance on the same spot.

The war has ended. Villages of Bosnian Croats have been destroyed, and they are living in the homes of the Croatian Serbs. An old man, a Bosnian Croat, disappears. A policeman Filip, himself living in a Serbian home, investigates the case uninterestedly. Through the relationship with his father, Filip tries to understand the motives of the missing old man. As the film moves towards the end, Filip’s investigation becomes more and more personal.

Ilija is a member of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) somewhere in Central Bosnia in late 1993. One morning, after a routine mine laying campaign, he learns his younger brother Goran was killed far beyond enemy lines, together with eight other soldiers. Through a friend from the secret service, he finds out the mission was an unofficial one and that Goran and the others were acting as mercenaries. Ilija begins to expose a network of illegal activity involving not only the military, but high-ranking officials. As the investigation becomes more dangerous, his original intention to find out the truth slowly turns into a pathological mission of vengeance.

With the arrival of Austro-Hungarians to Bosnia and Herzegovina and by establishing certain elements of a modern European society, Herzegovina has developed an "activity" that has been one of the leading for more than half a century.

Faced with the horrors of war, ten different people desperately try to find some connection to society and the human spirit, however, in the face of the conflict and anguish that surrounds their every waking moment, they gradually start loosing their faith in humanity as the pain they witness, and have to go through themselves, seems unending.

Stigme deals with the universal subject of ideological stigmatization. The film is set in western Herzegovina, in the turbulent period after the Second World War. It talks about the devastation in a traditional environment left by ideological confrontations, which culminates during a tobacco journey. The main character of the film is Dragan, the son of an ex-Yugoslav security-intelligence organization officer Mile (who ends up in prison). Dragan is forced to go on a tobacco journey with a group of tobacco smugglers, believing that none of the smugglers know his true identity.