Jelena Maksimovic Brings "Do kraja dana" to Venice
Jelena Maksimovic's feature debut premieres September 10 in Venice's Sala Darsena, in the official Orizzonti program, sixty years after Serbia's last woman director screened there.
On the evening of September 10, at five o’clock Venice time, the Sala Darsena will show the world the first frames of “Do kraja dana” (By the End of the Day), the feature directorial debut of Jelena Maksimovic. The festival opened officially tonight, September 2, on the Lido, and the exact premiere slot for the only Serbian title in the official selection arrived just eight days before the audience takes its seats in that hall.
The film has been selected for Orizzonti, the official competition section of the 83rd Venice Film Festival dedicated to contemporary auteur trends and new cinematic approaches, in which 18 feature films will compete this year. Maksimovic describes it as the story of a generation growing up in a time of deep divisions, one in which political and personal choices can rarely be pulled apart.
“Through the relationship between the two lead characters, I wanted to talk about the possibility of overcoming differences, and about a love that can be romantic, but also the love of friendship and solidarity. This film plays with the conventions of melodrama, comedy and crime cinema, and it is told in a single breath of youth, with all its contradictions, fears and hope,” the director says.
The cast is led by Lena Trifunovic, Andrija Krivokapic, Irina Hotomski and Stefan Tarabic, alongside Miodrag Dragicevic, Natasa Cakardic, Rasko Milatovic, Marko Dzudovic and Aleksandar Milosevic. The screenplay is credited to Maksimovic, Ivan Salatic and Olga Dimitrijevic, with Paul Spengemann behind the camera, Livija Mikic on production design and Jan Klemsche editing. Jelena Angelovski produced the film.
“Do kraja dana” is Maksimovic’s first feature after years working mostly in documentary and editing. The scale of her path to Venice shows in a figure rarely seen in Serbian cinema: the last woman director from Serbia to bring a feature film to this festival was Soja Jovanovic, back in 1966. Sixty years later, that blank line in the record finally gets a name, and the director reads the selection as carrying a message that reaches beyond the film itself.
“The simple fact that we were selected in the Orizzonti category made us happy, because we believe it is very important to increase the visibility of Serbian films at major festivals, especially given the current situation Serbian culture finds itself in,” says Maksimovic, without elaborating on what exactly she means.
Orizzonti is not a sideshow at the festival. For years it has been where Venice looks for what the main competition does not get to, films that push at form before they find an audience. This year’s jury is chaired by French director Valerie Donzelli, alongside American distributor Peter Becker, Hong Kong-American director Elizabeth Lo, Mexican director David Pablos and Italian actress Barbara Ronchi, which means “Do kraja dana” will be judged by filmmakers working at the edges of genre themselves, not by festival administrators. The jury hands out seven prizes, for best film, direction, a special jury prize, best actress, best actor, best screenplay and best short film, and any one of them would mean more for Serbian cinema than that list suggests at first glance.
What makes the project hard to file under a single national flag is the production itself: six countries, Serbia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Montenegro, Germany and Croatia, and six companies, from Belgrade’s Taurunum Film to Hamburg’s Kelek Film. The screenplay was developed through the TorinoScriptLab, When East Meets West and Les Arcs Work in Progress workshops, where scripts are tested before a camera ever rolls, and the project’s backers include the UNIQA SEE FUTURE program for women directors, alongside the Film Center Serbia and Creative Europe MEDIA. When Maksimovic mentions “the current situation Serbian culture finds itself in,” that line carries real weight against this backdrop: the film reached Venice on European funds and a regional co-production, not on the domestic financing system.
Whether “Do kraja dana” is a good film will only become clear inside the Sala Darsena, and later at its domestic premiere, set for the end of the year at the Auteur Film Festival in Belgrade. What is already clear is that a selection like this does not come around every decade, and that starting September 10, Jelena Maksimovic’s name will stand where Soja Jovanovic’s last stood, before most of today’s audience was even born.
