It is nighttime. In Croatia, a young woman cannot sleep because her baby keeps crying. Her mother-in-law is also being kept awake by the baby's crying and she is not shy about offering unwanted child-rearing advice to her daughter-in-law. In Spain, a young husband and wife are also wide awake in the dead of night: they are in the middle of a turbulent argument. She is Spanish, he is Croatian and their marriage is in crisis because they simply do not understand one another. Back in Croatia, the young man's elderly mother is also awake, plagued with indigestion pains. The old woman is also worried about her lodger, a young Spanish girl who happens to be the sister of the old woman's daughter-in-law in Spain. The young girl comes home with her new lover. He is a taxi driver who drifts aimlessly through the night while his own wife endures a sleepless night with a crying baby and a nagging mother-in-law.

Set amid the atrocities of war in the Balkans, Witnesses is retold, Rashomon-style, from various characters' viewpoints, adding new information about the complexity of war and humanity. Beginning inside a rustic house with a woman in black (Mirjana Karanovic) standing beside her husband's coffin, Witnesses interweaves the stories of a small town confronting ethnic hatred and deep moral ambiguities.

在1991年的秋天，一群的克罗地亚士兵搭着一个简易的装甲车去巡逻，不久后他们遭遇到伏击，他们的车辆被敌人摧毁，他们被迫在附近的一所房屋躲藏起来。他们驻扎在那所房子里进行了24小时的战斗.......电影的故事情节是根据克罗地亚独立战争期间发生的真实事件。