Review of Good Husband, Dear Son

The only drop of blood you see in "Good husband, dear son" is on the photograph of a young boy killed during an unknown genocide in 1992 in a little town in Bosnia, Ahatovici. His mother keeps the photograph, the only thing she has from him. The way the story of this genocide is told by Heddy Honigmann is absolutely touching and very original. There is no archive material, no detailed narration of the genocide and no boring journalistic information in this documentary. There are objects (working tools, photographs, a T-shirt, a watch, an apple tree...) which tell the story, objects cherished by the widows who lost their good husbands and dear sons. The memories these objects carry, told by these incredible strong women, make almost those boys and men alive. I never have seen a film which shows the spectator, with great poetry and delicacy and in such a profound way, the horror of what a war is and the emptiness and destruction a war lefts behind. The hole structure of a community is destroyed. The nice postman is death, the guitar-player who made the girls dance, the helpful man who brought the water to the little town, the football players, the man who loved to give advise to the ones who needed it... they are all gone and we also long for them. Great that the Sundance Channel showed "Good husband, dear son", a documentary of enormous quality.