The achievement of Zbanic’s compelling, deeply moving film is to give faces and personalities to the victims. And towering above them all is the character of Aida as she tenaciously fights to save her men.

It’s so harrowing that you have to remind yourself to breathe. But you won’t forget it, which is exactly the way Zbanic wants it.

banić supplies the material with an urgency familiar to the docudramas of Paul Greengrass, except with a strong current of despair and outrage that doesn't always poke through that filmmaker's meticulously detailed you-are-there accounts.

The horror experienced by Aida — and this entire town — is only emphasized in a devastating coda that demonstrates just how depraved these events were, and how profoundly the world failed them.