Contributed by: Kora Dilic, Croatia National VAW Monitor

Open Society Institute and the Sundance Institute are presenting a series of seventeen of the most provocative documentaries made with support from the Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund. The films will be shown at the Film Forum at 209 W Houston Street, in New York City from October 26^th until 29^th, 2006.

Among several shocking documentaries on lives and suffering of women from different continents, one presents first-person accounts of two women survivors of mass rapes during the war in Bosnia and Croatia.

The story is of Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, childhood friends and lawyers who lived the lives of ordinary modern women  in Bosnia in the town of Prijedor, until their lives were torn apart by war.  Their neighbors became their tormentors and raped and tortured them in a concentration camp in Omarska. Jadranka Cigelj is presently chairing the Governmental office for NGOs in Croatia, and she is also the author of a best-selling book “Apartment  102” that documents rape war crimes against women in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.