The Investigator

VLADIMIR DZURO is the only Czech investigator to have worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He collected evidence against war criminals and ethnic cleansing perpetrators. His two biggest cases include the Ovčara massacre related to Vukovar’s mayor SLAVKO DOKMANOVIĆ and ethnic cleansing committed by the war baron ŽELJKO RAŽNATOVIĆ, also known as Arkan. We join VLADIMIR DZURO on his metaphorical and real journey across the places of investigation in former Yugoslavia and meet the survivors of these cases. What is the landscape of the Balkans, which saw a fratricidal conflict twenty-five years ago, like today? What happened to the people who still live there and to their memory? What is the significance and meaning of justice brought from the outside?
The film is inspired by Vladimir Dzuro’s bestselling book The Investigator – Demons of the Balkan War, published in the Czech Republic as Vyšetřovatel – Démoni balkánské války a světská spravedlnost by Grada Publishing (2017) and in the USA by Potomac Books (2019).

Director’s statement

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia only sentenced a fragment of the perpetrators – a hundred key actors of the conflict who bore military or political responsibility. However, it naturally also had an indisputable symbolical dimension. With the benefit of hindsight, it is legitimate to ask what this huge international intervention brought us. I am far from challenging the meaningfulness of establishing the Tribunal as such; however, since it was said many times that its goal was to investigate the particular crimes to bring the reconciliation of the individual nations, we need to ask what consequences this gigantic international intervention had and how it recreated the landscape of the multiethnic and multinational conflict. What it improved, what it prevented; and, on the contrary, what it irreversibly damaged. What remained in the minds of the people. VLADIMIR DZURO along with all the protagonists of our film, definitely did not break out of the past.