In the film, the protests have a similar impact on 15-year-old Stefan, played by newcomer Jovan Ginic, who finds himself caught between the upheaval in the streets, and at school amid his anti-Milošević classmates and his loyalty to his family of staunch Milošević supporters. Stefan’s own mother, Marklena, is the spokeswoman for the regime. She goes on television every night to spread the government’s lies. Stefan overhears her talking on the phone, planning a police crackdown to violently suppress the demonstrations.
“My mother was also part of the Milošević government, though she was in the culture department, so not a spokeswoman,” says Perišić, “but I had this same experience as Stefan as a child, growing up in a political home [and] experiencing this conflict of double loyalty, between the loyalty you have to your parents, and a loyalty to some kind of inner moral imperative. All the politics of Serbian nationalism is based on family loyalty, this idea of belonging, by blood, to a group. It’s the basis of all right-wing politics, actually. I was interested in subverting that.”
To find his Stefan, Perišić scoured the country. “We met almost 2,000 kids but I couldn’t find the one. I was getting desperate,” he remembers. In the original script, Stefan, like Perišić, played water polo, and the director decided to scout out some of Belgrade’s water polo clubs.
Perišić spent nine months rehearing with the first-time actor before the first day of shooting. “It wasn’t really a rehearsal. I didn’t let him read the script. I was just asking him questions, like ‘what do you do when you quarrel with your mother?’ and filming that,” he says. “When we came to shoot, I filmed in order, chronologically, and treated the material as if I were shooting a documentary. If the actors did something different from what was in the script that took things in a different direction, I’d change the script. That’s why I love working with non-actors, it makes you humble. You discover the story together with them.”
The documentary approach extended to the locations and set design. Unable to afford period costumes or sets — “I didn’t have the budget to do a Visconti-style historical epic, and anyway I don’t much like those films, there’s a museum/antiquity feel to them” — Perišić instead found Belgrade streets and apartments unchanged since the late 90s.
“That’s why I shot so much in the backyards,” he says. “The neighborhood I shot in has changed a lot, but only from the front. If you go to the backyards, it looks exactly the same. You’d think you were back in 1996.”
“My idea with Jasna was that, as a politician, her character was acting all the time,” says Perišić. “So even when this mother comes home, and is with her son and her family, she’s still performing. But the documentary approach was the same. There’s a scene where Stefan asks his mother if the government has stolen the elections. She says no. She’s lying. And then, she goes down on her knees in front of him. I never wrote that. It came straight from Jasna. She’s a genius. Filming it, it felt like a documentary, like I was capturing a real moment.”
“The story obviously has echoes of what is happening now, with these threats to democracy we are seeing everywhere, not just with Trump in the United States or with [Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, but in the rise of the right-wing across Europe,” says Perišić. “In the 1990s, in ex-Yugoslavia, we really saw the return of historical fascism. I left Belgrade for France, and what I loved about France at the time was there was a real red line with the extreme right wing. In the public discourse, among mainstream political parties, and in the media on TV, far-right, fascism, was just not acceptable. Little by little, that’s changed and these ideas are becoming mainstream again. So my film is also a warning. These ideas aren’t dead and they can come back — quickly and ferociously.”
