Mirotvorac (Peacemaker). 2025. Croatia. Directed by Ivan Ramljak. North American premiere. DCP courtesy Taskovski. In Croatian; English subtitles.. 100 min.
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. Mirotvorac marks a career high for Ivan Ramljak, one of Croatia’s most respected documentary filmmakers, who deftly expands a contained moment in history into a gripping, resonant reflection on the elusive nature of peace.