Croatian NGO sues Dana Budisavljevic for "presenting a series of untruths and lies"
Croatian NGO Croatian World Congress filed a criminal complaint against film director Dana Budisavljević, claiming that she showed "series of untruths and lies"
Source: Tanjug
The Croatian non-governmental organization Croatian World Congress filed a criminal complaint against the director Dana Budisavljević, claiming that she showed "a series of untruths and lies" in her film "Diary of Diana Budisavljević".
The director said that she was not familiar with the complaint, nor that she would respond to those claims, because she believes that the Croatian World Congress is being promoted by attacking her.
"We do not know to which body this "criminal charges" of the Croatian World Congress was submitted, nor what it means. We will not react, because we think that it is a matter of promoting that institution," Dana Budisavljevic said.
All this is very clumsily worded, and it is obvious, says the director, that the organization wants to put pressure on teachers so that the film about Diana Budisavljević would not be shown in Croatian schools, Tanjug reports.
"It is an attempt to intimidate, but no one took this "lawsuit "seriously, so the Croatian media have not written about it at all so far," Budisavljevic added.
The director reminds that the film is still shown in schools where teachers decide to show it themselves and no one puts pressure on them.
"It is symptomatic for me that these pressures come from people from the Croatian diaspora, who have not lived in Croatia for years," Dana Budisavljevic added.
In the lawsuit, the Croatian World Congress, which claims to be a member of the United Nations, says "that the film did not say how Diana Budisavljevic saved the children of Kozara."
They even claim that the Ustasha government organized the rescue of the children, and that this was left out in the film.
The director is also accused of "fictional violence by police agents in Diana Budisavljevic's apartment", and the role of the infamous commander of the Ustasha Surveillance Service (UNS), Eugen Kvaternik, is being defended, according to "Novosti".
The feature-length documentary from 2019, which was a great success at festivals and cinemas across the region, and was the absolute winner of the Pula Film Festival, with six awards, is a true story about a citizen of Austrian origin married to a doctor of the Orthodox faith in Zagreb. During World War II, she saved more than 10.000 Serb children from certain death in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) concentration camp.
