Louder than Guns

Aircrafts, tanks, bombs, automatic rifles, media and propaganda were the Homeland War weaponry of choice. Nevertheless, the loudest were the songs. Ones used them to describe the nightmares that befell them, others to confirm their political loyalty. The national TV broadcaster considered music an important form of political 'fight', so they commissioned, financed, recorded and intensely broadcasted it. Even twenty years after the end of the Homeland War, its soundtrack still attracts attention and sparks emotions.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, patriotic music played an extremely important role in the political changes occurring in all the former Yugoslavian countries, especially in Croatia. In the first multi-party election after the Second World War, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) beat the reformed communists with a great help from music, which in 1990 took an active part in boosting the national spirit. The system changed – from a unitary, socialist Yugoslavia to an independent and democratic Croatia – but the structure of music serving political goals remained the same. Open aggression in Croatia in the autumn of 1991 sparked an impulse response from musicians like never before – from fiddlers and tambura players, to pop singers, to dance musicians, to rockers and punkers. The national broadcaster, Croatian Radio Television (HRT), became their most powerful sponsor – it commissioned new patriotic songs, broadcasted the existing ones, organised and funded countless patriotic music festivals and charity concerts, enabled many patriotic music videos to be recorded. Only in the first few, the most intense months of war, several hundred new songs were recorded. Their final number still remains unknown. However, many of them have not survived the war, and the story of them is still unfinished and untold.

With appearances by: Zrinko Tutić, Vera Svoboda, Josip Ivanković, Mladen Kvesić, Davor Gobac, Boytronic, Sandra Kulier, Mario Pešo, Borut Šeparović, Miroslav Lilić, Ante Perković and many others.