FREEDOM FROM DESPAIR

Review by Michael Kogge for Center Stage

Comrade Tito -- the leader of former Communist Yugoslavia -- was regarded in America and Europe as "the good Soviet." Westerners saw him as a man of the people, one of the few Communists who had a soft heart.

But filmmaker Brenda Brkusic paints an entirely different portrait of Tito. In her documentary, Freedom from Despair, Tito is a cruel hardliner who imprisoned and sometimes killed any elements who spoke against the state.

Brkusic's film is not any academic attempt at revising history. Rather, it is a story that has been ignored, a personal portrait of how her Croatian father and his friends fled totalitarian Yugoslavia. But the price of their freedom was a high one indeed. Even as refugees in America or Italy, they could not escape all of Tito's tyranny. Unable to contact their families, some were forever estranged from their mother and fathers.

What is amazing about Freedom from Despair is that Brkusic produced it as her undergraduate students thesis, complete with having celebrated actors John Savage and Michael York narrating the film, and interviewing with such luminaries as 2004 presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich. She even goes a step beyond the traditional documentary and re-stages the events of her father's flight through the Yugoslavian-Italian border. These vignettes are the highlight of the film. They don't play like some phony History Channel reenactment -- there's real emotion handled here by a director who loves her subject.

And its the passion Brkusic has for telling us the real story of Yugoslavia in whatever form -- drama or documentary -- that makes Freedom from Despair a must-see for anyone who wants to understand the other side of communism in the Cold War.

This is Michael Kogge for Center Stage. Freedom from Despair is available on-line at www.freedomfromdespair.com

A story surrounding Freedom from Despair was also published in HRVATSKI TJEDNIK FOKUS at the following link:

http://www.fokus-tjednik.hr/vijest.asp?vijest=3600