WATCH: This powerful drama about gay men in 1950s Europe is Croatia’s controversial Oscar contender
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day will be vying for an Oscar nomination in Best International Feature Film. And even though it’s set in the 1950s, it tells an urgent, timely story that could make it a real contender for the prize, against all odds.From writer-director Ivona Juka, the black-and-white drama is inspired by harrowing true events, following a gay filmmaker and his collaborators as they attempt to make art under communist rule in the former nation of Yugoslavia.Back during WWII, young Lovro (Dado Ćosić) became a hero of the resistance as he and his comrades—Nenad (Djordje Galic), Stevan (Slaven Doslo) and Ivan (Elmir Krivalic)—helped protect their country from fascist forces.
Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.Sixteen years later, Lovro and friends are acclaimed filmmakers who feel they should have the freedom to create features that criticize the society they fought so hard for.
But Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito leads with a strict authority and is quick to punish those who oppose him, so his party assigns Agent Emir (Emir Hadzihafizbegovic) to supervise their studio.However, it’s largely because of their homosexuality that the artists are forced to live and work under a microscope of intense scrutiny.
At the time of Tito’s reign, the LGBTQ+ community was harshly discriminated against, with same-sex activity eventually becoming criminalized in 1959.In an especially dark chapter of global queer history, it’s estimated that Tito’s communist regime arrested upwards of 500 gay men, sending a number of them to the notorious penal colony Goli Otok—also referred to as “Barren Island”—with brutal conditions that many did not survive.Hello, readers!
