Life proceeds at a gentle pace in Ahatovici, a picturesque village in the green hills outside Sarajevo.

But Ahatovici was far from quiet in 1992, when the Chetniks rounded up and murdered 80 percent of the men. Not a single house escaped the curse of death. Ten years later, the women carry on with the chores and rituals of the day-to-day, still weighted with grief.

Dutch master Heddy Honigmann respectfully invites several widows to describe their beloved through the most basic yet profound touchstones. The dead men live on in pictures, of course, but also in their clothes and tools, and especially in the walls they plastered and the doorposts they built. They come to life through the heartbreaking words of their women. Ignoring the temptation to make a political or even an antiwar statement, Honigmann nobly chooses to humanize, eulogize and (given the nature of film) immortalize Refik, Eldin, Sead and the other victims.

—Michael Fox