A prosecutor at a tribunal in the Hague attempts to convince a potential witness to testify in a crucial case against the man accused of deporting and killing Bosnian-Muslim civilians in a small town now known as the Republika Srpska in this tense courtroom drama from director Hans-Christian Schmid. Hannah Maynard is determined to make Goran Duric pay for his crimes against humanity. Her case is complicated, however, when a key witness in the trial becomes ensnared by the contradictions of his
own testimony. In order to gain a better understanding of the facts of the case, the court sends a delegation to Bosnia, where the suspicions regarding the reliability of the witness are quickly confirmed. When the witness commits suicide, it begins to appear as if Duric will walk free. Now, Hannah's last hope of keeping the case alive is to travel to the witnesses' funeral in Sarajevo. There, Hannah comes into contact with the witnesses' sister Mira, who seems to know more about the defendant than she readily admits. Hannah works hard to gain Mira's trust, eventually convincing the girl to face her fears of the past and testify in the Hague. When Duric's defense team attempts to have Mira's testimony disallowed and finds their efforts unexpectedly supported by the members of the judiciary, Hannah realizes that her greatest adversaries aren't necessarily at the docks, but standing right beside her in the courtroom every day. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
In this taut drama about the trial of a Bosnian Serb general from German director and co-writer Hans Christian Schmid, we see how justice can be subverted by interests as banal as international bureaucracy, despite the best intentions...
The writing by director Hans-Christian Schmid and Bernd Lange is more stilted and righteous than even the U.N. environs, with its humanity-embracing procedural-speak, calls for.
Under the geopolitics is a strong undercurrent of sexual politics: the men secretly make their deals without a thought to the women whose lives and commitments are on the line.
Shot in an appropriately dry, non-sensational style, German director Hans-Christian Schmid's courtroom thriller does a decent job of exposing the complexities of the issue and the way bureaucratic cowardice can blight and skew morality.
The Hague's sterile offices and endless grey urban sprawl could have made Storm drab; thanks to the cool eye of the filmmaker and the two leads, it's anything but.
Occasionally, the dialogue clunks but a winningly vulnerable performance from Marinca goes a long way to building up a picture of a compromised world of political horse-trading where even war criminals can get away with it.
Gritty and bereft of excessive drama, director Hans-Christian Schmid offers a clinical study of how a legal system is ill-equipped to heal emotional scars.
Hans-Christian Schmid marshals his material on an epic canvas whereas the subject might have been better suited to a more intense and contained treatment.
Good drama! Not terribly fast moving, but I tend to like that sometimes if the story is intriguing enough. The acting was very, very good. The storyline was very interesting. A lady prosecutor is hellbent on making a war criminal pay for his crimes. A witness is determined to make this same war criminal pay for the
horrible things that he was responsible for by helping the prosecutor bring him to justice. All was well played out. I enjoyed it.
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