The 83rd Venice International Film Festival’s Orizzonti competition will host the world premiere of Until the Day Ends (Do kraja dana), the fiction-feature debut of Serbian filmmaker Jelena Maksimović.
Co-written by Maksimović, Ivan Salatić and Olga Dimitrijević, Until the Day Ends is a coming-of-age drama set against contemporary political unrest in Serbia.
The film’s synopsis sets the premise:
Belgrade is a city divided. Amid occupied buildings and crowded streets, Lena fights for a world she believes can still be changed. Stefan, a young man from the same neighborhood, is pulled toward the opposing side of the protests. When their paths cross, they discover a shared restlessness, and a longing for freedom neither can fully articulate.
Lena (Lena Trifunović) is a 20-year-old anarchist student active in Serbia’s anti-government movement. Stefan (Andrija Krivokapić), a 22-year-old working-class youth, finds himself almost by accident among pro-government loyalists. Standing on opposite sides of the demonstrations, the two navigate an increasingly volatile mixture of ideological conflict, intimacy and youthful defiance. The story unfolds against Serbia’s largest student protests in decades, which erupted following the collapse of a railway-station canopy in Novi Sad that killed 16 people.
“In 2021, while mentoring a workshop, I met a girl called Lena whose presence awakened vivid memories of my own adolescence,” Maksimović said. “Through her, I caught a glimpse of how my younger self might look and think today. She inspired the fictional character of Lena in this film.” The director added that Lena and Stefan’s ideological and intimate conflict unfolds within “a fractured post-Yugoslav society”, with the film combining melodrama, comedy, crime and road-movie conventions into “an elliptical coming-of-age portrait of adolescence and resistance”.
Behind the camera, German cinematographer Paul Spengemann is joined by editor Jan Klemsche and sound designer Vladimir Živković. The cast is led by Lena Trifunović, Andrija Krivokapić, Irina Hotomski, Stefan Tarabić, Nataša Čakardić and Miodrag Dragičević, and consists primarily of non-professional actors. Dragičević, who plays Lena’s brother, is the sole professional performer.
Until the Day Ends also marks a significant moment for Serbian cinema. Maksimović becomes the first woman from Serbia to bring a fiction feature to the Venice Film Festival’s official selection since Soja Jovanović presented Eagles Fly Early in 1966, a gap of 60 years.
Take an exclusive first look at the poster below.