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
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