The documentary Goli otok presents the history of the concentration camp built on an island at the Croatian northern seashore bearing the same name, during the clashes between Tito and Stalin from 1949 to 1955. The reconstruction of life at the camp and of the methods of political re-building is based on the testimonies of the former prisoner Alfred Pal, while the words of the former general of the Yugoslavian secret political police Jovo Kapicic reveal the establishment's view on the logic's and the motives that led to the creation of the Camp. This documentary also reveals more than a few non-published documents of the Yugoslav secret services shedding new light on the consequences of the Tito-Stalin skirmish that spelled doom for the condemned enemies of the state Stalin's allies.—Anonymous
An island in the pretty northern Croatian coast of the Adriatic sea turned, during the time of the Tito-Stalin clash (from 1949 to 1955), into an island-experiment, specialized in re-constructing and re-making the regimes opponents it became a topos of non-time, non-existence, a place of forgetting, a point of erasure, of annihilation, thus unintentionally confirming its name Goli otok (Bare Island). Despite the then Yugoslav socialism with a human face and despite the schism with the Cominform and the Eastern Bloc, the Yugoslav regime retained some of the traditions and manners of the bloc, using them to resolve all the problems with the Stalinists. The reconstruction of the time and of the methods of political re-building is based on the testimonies of the former prisoner, painter and graphic artist Alfred Pal, while the narrative of the former general of the UDB Jovo Kapii reveals the official view of the logic behind and the motives for the camps establishment. There comes a third persona the prisoner Milovan Zec existing only in written and still unpublished police dossiers, thus providing the possibility of reconstructing the educational methods and giving an insight into the doubts and psychological profiles born at this historical period. Those three characters with their words, antagonistic, non-antagonistic, denying, confirming one another, almost succeed in shaping the structure of classical tragedy Alfred Pal as victims testimony, Jovo Kapii as executioners history, and, last but not least, Mihajlo Zec as the Choir at this moment mute, dead, erased, existing only in written words. It is totally unimportant for these words, for him and the present, whether they are truthful, or whether this is just one more case of edited history, which still further emphasises the inevitability of the prisoners fates and is a proof of their overwhelming inability to fight the gods of justice and the system i.e. history is written by the victor. Almost to this day there is a wall of silence, frustrating every effort properly to scrutinize history or any other study of that historical period therefore the multifaceted structure of this documentary gives us a valuable insight into the political and ideological context of the period this part of the world is blessed with all sorts of burdens; collective guilt, which inevitably leads to efforts to settle accounts with the past, the collective memory of fear (these parts really have something to remember) in this case memory of fear begins with the atrocities of Goli Otok, indirectly influencing the historical span that leads all the way to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the bloody war that raged here from 1990 to (unofficially) 1998. Goli Otok nowadays is empty, barren, mute; a no-mans land where only the sheep graze, torn between winds and the sea, monument to madness, memories of the evil which (evidently) could be ambivalent in their nature including the memories of both executioner and victim.
