The Peacemaker (Mirotvorac)

Croatia, 2025 (99 min.)

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In Croatian with English subtitles

Winner of the Grand Prize at the 2025 Doc Leipzig festival, Mirotvorac traces the months preceding the 1991 Serbo-Croatian War—itself an outcome of the long collapse of Yugoslavia—through the figure of Josip Reihl Kir, an eastern Croatian politician who strove to diffuse tensions in his community right up until his violent assassination. Composed almost entirely of Croatian television archival material—much of it previously unseen—the images are accompanied by offscreen, first-person accounts that offer an expanded oral history of Kir and that fraught moment.

“A documentary that plays out like the tensest of
crime-thrillers.”  — Cineuropa

“My film deals with the causes of that event, how it could have happened that a police chief could be killed like that in broad daylight in a populated area, in front of a crowd of witnesses.” 

— Ivan Ramljak