Ivona Juka’s drama Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day, which is Croatia’s Oscar entry this year and is screening in L.A. today as part of a guerilla awards campaign, breaks fresh ground for its exploration of the persecution of Yugoslavia’s LGBT community under Tito in the 1950s.
Croatian actor Dado Ćosić stars as partisan hero Lovro who fought the local fascist forces of the Ustashas and the Nazis as a young man during WWII and then built a career as a film director in peacetime.
Ćosić is joined in the film by actors from across the ex-Yugoslavia in the roles of ex-resistance comrades and cinema collaborators, including Nenad (Djordje Galic), Stevan (Slaven Doslo) and Ivan (Elmir Krivalic).
Some 16 years after their wartime bravery, Lovro and his friends come under the scrutiny of Tito’s Communist Party for their sexual orientation.
Apparatchik Emir, played by veteran actor Emir Hadzihafizbegovic, who won best actor in Venice in 2014 for his performance in These Are The Rules, is assigned to their film studio, with a mission to keep an eye on what they are up to.
Homosexuality was increasingly discriminated against by Yugoslavia’s ruling Communist Party in the 1950s, and officially criminalized in 1959, with the ban lifted in the republics of Croatia and Slovenia in 1977, with Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia only following suit after the country’s break-up in the 1990s.
Shot in black-and-white, period drama Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day explores a dark chapter, in which some 500 gay men were imprisoned, with a handful sent to the country’s notorious Goli Otok, or Barren Island, penal colony in the northern Adriatic Sea.
It also gives a wider insight into life in Yugoslavia in the 1950s, as Communist leader Tito tightened his grip on the country and sought to instil his brand of Marx-based socialism in the population.
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day is Juka’s second fiction feature after 2015 drama You Carry Me, exploring the relationships between three female characters and their fathers, which world premiered at Karlovy Vary, and then played multiple festivals.
The director, who works closely with producer sister Anita Juka, says her new work is inspired by a late close family member who was persecuted for his homosexuality throughout his life.
“We’re from a very progressive family. Our parents were professors, and our grandparents as well. Our father was professor of Greek and Philosophy, and our mother, History of Arts. So, we grew up in a bubble, a very protective bubble,” says Juka.
“But in our family, a very close and dear member was persecuted and tortured. Even in the 80s, he had some incidents which we remember from our childhood. We were aware that that being gay was really, really difficult. Both of us adored him so much. Unfortunately, he passed away. This film is a love letter to him and his generation,” she says.
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day follows the slow chipping away at Lovro, and his descent from free-spirited film director to emaciated prisoner on Barren Island, or Goli Otok, who holds on to his humanity by a thread.
The Goli Otok penal colony was opened in 1949, mainly to hold political prisoners accused of being sympathetic to Joseph Stalin, after Tito resisted the Soviet leader’s push in 1948 to exert control over the country.
Some 16,500 people passed through the island between 1949 and 1956, with differing reports that between 600 to 4,600 people died as a result of their treatment there.
“I did a huge research amount of research into stories from that period,” says Juka. “Barren Island was a concentration camp until 1957, where prisoners were made to torture other prisoners.
“When new prisoners came to the camp, the other prisoners were forced to beat them as a welcome. If a person refused to beat them, they would be sent back into the welcoming line. The aim was to break their humanity. If someone went to that prison, their reputation was ruined. People were pretty much aware that they would have been involved in torturing others.”
Few people would talk about their experiences on the island, out of shame for their actions while there, she adds.
“If you’re a victim, you’re not feeling ashamed, but if you’re an abuser at the same time, then you don’t want to speak about it,” she says.
Some of those on sent to the island, had been arrested on trumped up charges, or false accusations aimed at settling old scores, while the prison population also included hardened criminals.
“Voja Brajović, his father was on Barren Island, as was his wife’s father… two professors,” says Juka, referring to renowned Serbian acting star, who plays Lovro’s father in the film.
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day does not focus only on Lovro’s time in captivity, with much of the film devoted to his life and relationships prior to his imprisonment, and the growing sense of a net tightening around his freedom.
One of the challenges encountered by Juka at the casting stage was her decision to include sex scenes between her male protagonists.
“I had huge conversations with some big Serbian stars who had a problem with the love scenes. They were trying get me to cut them. They were telling me, ‘The script is so strong. It’s a beautiful story about freedom. You don’t need those scenes’,” recounts Juka.
“I unapologetically said no. One of the pillars on which I built the film is the battle between Eros and Thanatos,” she explains. “Eros is the only place of freedom. Thanatos is all around them. They cannot buy the stuff they want. People are spying on each other. They don’t have freedom of speech, or of working on the things they want to work on. The only place of freedom is Eros. Showing those scenes under the sheets, with a kiss and cuddle, would not be moving the needle. Censoring those scenes would have been against this story.”
“We’ve seen so many films with heterosexual relationships and heterosexual love scenes in all shapes, and intensities and it’s time to show homosexual sex. Once we’ve seen five of those films, no-one will blink or find them shocking. Let’s get used to that and let’s portray that sexuality in a beautiful way too.”
Juka spent a long time talking with the actors over how to play and shoot these scenes and admits she was nervous going into the shoot.
“It was very important for me to have very honest and direct conversations with them. I told them, ‘Guys I can watch gay porn but it’s not reality.’ I asked them how it should it look. I told them, I had a gay member of my family, but I didn’t know about their intimacy just like I don’t know anything about that of my parents,’ she says.
“I was a bit afraid about the rehearsals. I was afraid that they would feel that I am unexperienced in that, but it was the same as directing a heterosexual scene.”
Other challenges faced by Juka and sister Anita Juka, who is lead producing under the banner of their joint Zagreb-based 4Film Production company, were locations and potential financing offers being withdrawn due to the LGBT-focused storyline.
“Three locations cancelled us because they heard we were filming a gay story, while Anita had huge problems with local film funds, who cancelled on us at the last moment,” says Juka.
Anita Juka recounts how one official from Karolina – Zagorje County, where the film shot several scenes on location, stopped returning her calls, having initially been enthusiastic about the prospect of hosting a major production.
“I had a meeting with them and they were very excited, because a film shoot can bring in other shoots, and boost tourism, but when they learned it was a LGBTQ topic, they stopped replying to my emails,” she recounts. “It was strange because we had lunch and then I never heard from them again.”
When the film shot in the region, one bystander approached veteran star Brajović, saying she hoped he wasn’t appearing in the “gay partisan movie” that had been reported about in the press.
“He replied, ‘Yes, that’s it and I’m playing the father of a gay partisan. It’s a beautiful film, you should watch it when it comes out.’ She was shocked,” says Anita Juka.
The producer is no stranger to dealing with homophobia having previously produced Turkish director Emin Alper’s Burning Days, which ended up in the crosshairs of the Turkey’s Ministry of Culture for the gay relationship in the film.
Shortly after its world premiere in Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2022, the ministry demanded the return of the money it had awarded to the production on the pretext that the movie had not followed the screenplay submitted for the funding application.
Anita Juka now questions whether Turkey, which is a member of the Council of Europe’s cultural support fund Eurimages, played a part in Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day not securing backing from the Strasbourg-based body, after her previous productions won funding.
A more recent challenge facing the sibling director and producer team has been a smaller grant than usual from the Croatian Film Center (CFC) for their awards campaign.
The organisation gave them $73,000 (€69,500), which they say is less than half the $161,168 (€153,000) given to last year’s Croatian Oscar entry Traces, or the $151,690 (€144,000) allotted to Nebojša Slijepčević’s Cannes Palme d’Or winning short The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent.
The pair say they feel something is off and suggest that disapproval of the film’s LGBT focus as well as its explicit love-making scenes may have played its part in the lower support.
Contacted by Deadline, the institute outright denies the claims, saying the filmmakers submitted paperwork for their awards funding request late, and that additionally, this year, it has decided to focus its efforts on The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent due its Cannes credentials.
The sisters say they are baffled by the explanation pointing to the fact that the film was unanimously elected as the Oscar entry by all 12 film professional associations in Croatia in early September, weeks before buzzy entries for like Emilia Perez or I’m Still Here were declared.
Acknowledging that their protests are unlikely to change the funding decision, the pair are focusing their efforts on getting the film seen, tapping into their network of film industry contacts to arrange screenings in New York, L.A. and next week, London.
“It’s a blow, but we’ve moved on” says Juka of the lack of CFC funding. “Our priority is to get the film seen. We believe it’s an important story, with a universal message, and we’re doing all we can to get it out there.”
Watch a trailer for the film here:
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