07/04/2025 - With his archive documentary, Ivan Ramljak frames the story of the assassination of a peace activist in war-torn Croatia as a nail-biting thriller

There is a consensus, of sorts, on the level of the whole of Croatian society that the Homeland War, or the War of Independence, in the 1990s was inevitable, and the division between the sides was simply black and white: the Serbs were war-mongering aggressors, while the Croats were victims caught off guard by how the situation developed, so their resistance against the aggressor was purely heroic. The war leaders and commanders are still regarded as heroes, while the efforts of those who had tried to defuse the tense situation before it exploded into a full-blown war are swept under the rug. One of those unsung heroes is Josip Reihl-Kir, the protagonist and title character of Ivan Ramljak’s newest documentary, Peacemaker, which has just premiered at ZagrebDox.

Reihl-Kir was the chief of the Osijek Police Department, which covered the area near the Croatian-Serbian border. As the ethnic tensions in the region mounted over the course of one year, from 1990-1991, he was the authority figure that was trusted by both local Croats and Serbs, so he used this fact to avoid the open armed conflict, or at least delay it for as long as possible. However, the “hawks” on both sides misinterpreted his words or publicly attacked him for cowardice. On 1 July 1991, he was assassinated by a Croatian paratrooper, Anton Gudelj, who was convicted for his act, but only much, much later. Peacemaker portrays the last year of Reihl-Kir’s life in an atmosphere that leads to bloody conflict.

Collaborating with journalists Hrvoje Zovko and Drago Hedl in the script department, Ramljak creates a documentary that plays out like the tensest of crime-thrillers, although the events and the people they involved are not exactly unknown in Croatia. Relying on multiple narrators, such as business owner and Croatian Army volunteer Nikola Jaman, former security service operative Zdravko Pejić, local journalist Goran Flauder and, to a minor extent, local politician Gordana Ajduković and Reihl-Kir’s widow Jadranka, Ramljak re-tells the events from 34-35 years ago with clinical factual precision, but also constructs the archetype of a narrative movie, positioning Josip Reihl-Kir as its hero, and political and paramilitary leader Branimir Glavaš as the villain.

Peacemaker is equally stunning on the directing level, since it is quite creative in playing with our expectations and overcoming the objective obstacles in terms of the very material included in the film. It is an archival type of documentary, but the actual archive footage or photo material regarding Josip Reihl-Kir is neither extensive nor varied enough to construct the feature out of that alone. Ramljak fills in the blanks with archival footage on other topics (one of the most stunning sequences provides a prologue and an epilogue to one iconic TV clip where a tank crashes into a small, old car), and with home-video shots that show daily life in the city of Osijek and its surroundings during that period, revealing the increasingly tense atmosphere. Ramljak is clinical in that department as well: the footage and the narration match perfectly and serve the story, but some praise also has to be reserved for the inspired editing by Damir Čučić.

With Peacemaker, Ivan Ramljak once again proves himself to be a contemporary master of documentary cinema. This is a film that requires complete and utter silence in the darkened theatre hall – preferably even without blinking. It is absolutely gripping and is a bona-fide masterpiece.

Peacemaker is a Croatian production by Factum.