If the lion's share of the films inspired by the conflicts that tore apart the former Yugoslavia in the early '90s can be said to have a quality in common it's a sense of tragic absurdity. Everything from Before The Rain to No Man's Land to Pretty Village, Pretty Flame returns to the notion that if wars are always tragic, fighting between people who have lived beside one another for years compounds the tragedy. It's bad enough when someone from a foreign land puts a bullet in you but even worse when it's the neighbor down the street. The Croatian film Witnesses revives this theme, repeatedly revisiting a single incident from multiple perspectives. None of them are particularly flattering to anyone involved, but the sum effect leads to a steely eyed sense of balance: Even the most brutal actions have their roots somewhere, even if those roots don't excuse the brutality.
Adapting the Jurica Pavicic novel Alabaster Sheep, the film opens with three Croatian soldiers paying a visit to the home of a man said to be in league with Serbs. Meaning only to destroy his house, their hate crime turns into murder, and possibly worse. Finding him at home, they gun him down and kidnap the only witness, his young daughter. From there, director Vinko Bresan pulls back to follow the police investigation into the event, the reaction of the gunmen, the events leading up to it, and the end results (but not in that order). The film offers little in the way of mystery, apart from the vagaries created by its fractured chronology, and its digressions occasionally work against it dramatically. But Bresan's graceful presentation of a town that seems resigned never again to know peace, and the sadness driving the actors' performances summon up a sense that the central incident is just the latest mad outburst in an ongoing tragedy to which both the town and its citizens have all been witness for too long.