The film is created by Vedrana Pribačić and Mirta Puhlovski.
Bigger Than Trauma is a documentary feature which has won several international awards. It had its national premiere in April 2022 at ZagrebDox in Croatia, and international one at the Hot Docs Festival in Canada.
Bigger Than Trauma is a beautiful film about a group of women from Vukovar discovering who they could be without the trauma they’re identified with, and that changes their lives and relations.
These are women whose families were killed during the Croatian war for independence; who were enslaved, tortured, and raped, but survived. They had been silenced for 25 years.
Many families still live surrounded by trauma and exist in the past, unable to move forward.
Frictions within the group erupt along cultural lines, reinforcing past pain, but this is precisely what’s needed to cultivate acceptance and peace.
From being the collateral damage of war, they are transformed into empowered women.
Content warning: description of violence
Vedrana Pribačić (born 1977) is a Croatian journalist, director and screenwriter. She holds a master’s degree in politics from the University of Political Science in Zagreb. She is a member of HDFD (the Croatian Association of Film Professionals). Vedrana has been working as a TV reporter and editor-in-chief since 2000 for various TV channels (OTV, NOVA TV, RTL, CNN World View).
In 2016 she made her first 45-minute documentary for Croatian national television. The film was presented at several festivals in Europe and won awards at Croatian festivals. In 2017 Vedrana started developing her directorial debut Bigger Than Trauma, and she has been working on it for five years.
With this project she was part of several professional pitching forums and workshops such as FOCAL’s intensive European residential masterclass, Docu Rough Boutique (Sarajevo F.F. & the Balkan Documentary Centre 2020), the When East Meets West pitching forum (Trieste, 2019), ZagrebDox Pro (Zagreb, 2019), Rough Cut Lab Movies that Matter (Haag, 2021) and more.
