Doc The Investigator follows ex-Prague detective in former Yugoslavia
New documentary The Investigator follows one-time Prague detective Vladimír Dzuro as he returns to former Yugoslavia, where he made a groundbreaking 1997 war crimes arrest after helping uncover a grisly mass killing. The film had its world premiere at the Jihlava documentary film festival, where I asked its young Czech director Viktor Portel what had drawn him to the subject.
“For me, I think the main thing is there aren’t a lot of stories like this in modern history.
“We don’t have a lot of male characters, real male characters, who have such big international success, in their life.
“So that was one thing. The other thing is that in all of my projects I am somehow focused on the past and on dealing with the past.
“And this was very interesting for me, because it was dealing with the past, but in a very current situation.”
About the style of the film, you use narration instead of interviewing Vladimír Dzuro. Why did you do it that way?
“I knew from the beginning that I have to make a kind of decision.
“Not only is Vladimír not speaking directly to camera – almost no-one in the film is speaking to the camera.
“And they don’t meet each other, which is very important.
“I took this decision because I knew from the beginning that I don’t want to have a film of Vladimír Dzuro as a hero who is coming back to former Yugoslavia and people are hugging him and saying, Yeah, you are super great.
“I knew it was not the film I would like to do, it’s not the story that I would like to tell.
“So I decided to find some space for some reflection, and that was the reason that why I interviewed people in advance, before the shooting.
“That was the reason why we recorded Vladimír Dzuro’s inner voice after all the shooting, after the rough cut, because we wanted to have him as a kind of commentator of those voices from former Yugoslavia.”
What were some of the more intense places that you filmed in during the making of The Investigator?
“It’s not one place. We were at the places of those mass murders and so on, at these places of mass graves.
“But for me the strongest moment was when we found somewhere on the internet that there is a kind of book in Bosnia and Herzegovina that is called the ‘book of the dead’
“I saw it on the internet on PDFs and wrote to our colleagues in Bosnia, asking them if they could bring it to the shooting.
“They were refusing and telling us, We cannot take it, it’s too big.
“But we managed to get it somehow and, it’s hard to describe it by words, but they were three really big and heavy books, full of names.
“In that moment I realised that those little stories we are talking about happened everywhere in this landscape.
“And it was so strong for me.”
How hard was it to get some of the people you did speak to? For instance you spoke to the wife of Dokmanovic, a suspected war criminal?
“The hardest thing was to find them.
“For this film we found his wife and also we found one guy who was till that time a protected witness of the Hague Tribunal.
“So it was harder to find them. When we found them, they were willing to speak.”
Would you say The Investigator has some kind of message for the viewer? What would you like the viewer to take away from the film?
“I think there are maybe two messages.
“The first is very optimistic, and that is that every crime leaves a trace, that it’s possible to establish an international justice mechanism which works, and which helps.
“Maybe the second is that of course it works and it helps, but it’s only a small part of what we call dealing with the past.”
A trailer for The Investigator by Viktor Portel.
