Love, War & Tears

This is a wartime love story of two young people, brought together by terror and destruction in Croatia. Their journey starts in 1991, as the war begins to spread across the land. From the nightmare and blood being spilt, a deep love was born. For a love so right, yet so wrong, the quest for survival begins. Can they survive against all odds?That year, the war was spreading across the expanse of the former Yugoslavia. It lasted onlyfor a short period in Slovenia, but it blazed up in its full force in Croatia. The agitators brought back from Serbia, manipulated with the local Serbian population and together with the Yugoslav National Army, triggered the beginning of destruction, devastation and murder of civil Croatian society.Croatia becomes productive territory for hundreds of newsreporters from all around the world, and from there they inform their homeland stations of the terror appearing before their eyes. One of them is an Australian reporter Suzane Goudin, from her mother’s side Croatian. She comes to Split, a town situated along the Adriatic Coast, where, right at the beginning of her journey meets a local newsreporter Mario Matovina. Up until then, Mario also wrote for an Australian newspaper whose owner was Suzane’s father.Although Mario was happily married father of three children and Suzane Goudin, a young widow with one child, between them, from the very first start, a chemistry and a strong sense of attraction existed.Mario’s father is the former general of Yugoslav’s National Army, and in the previous days of aggression within Croatia, he feels shame for all the things that same army is doing to Croatia. He puts his personal experience and places it to his country`s disposal whom he had loved so greatly and would sacrafice himself for.He has a stroke and becomes chained to his hospital bed. In those dramatic moments between life and death, Mario awaits in his fathers presence for the worst.Although he loves his wife, Mario has a hard time denying and resisting the feelings he feels towards Suzane. At the beginning, it was all sexual attraction, which has with time developed into something much more deeper. The terror and nightmare of the war had made them closer. A love was born. Is it possible to love two women at the same time?The southern sky of Dubrovnik was not covered in starts any longer, but by granades and mines. Death spread across the old Dubrovnik’s walls.During the artillery attack on Dubrovnik, Mario uses all his power, his body, his mind, his soul to protect Suzane. They go through hell, he is wounded, looses a part of his arm during the ongoing battle while Suzane looses her baby to him at Split’s hospital. Although she was pregnant, he didn’t know.Suzane departs for Australia, while wounded Mario goes back to his family. All over again, he starts experiencing love with his wife. In the year 1995, Suzane dies inFrankfurt form leukemia. She wished to die in Croatia, but death was quicker and beat her to it. She was buried in her native soil along the Adriatic Coast where her mother was from.Mario did not attend the funeral. He went the next day, when he could stay peacefully goodbye to his wartime love.The war in Croatia ended, right when this deeply moving love story did. The war had brought them together, but it also ripped them apart.