Heretic has acquired world rights to Jelena Maksimović’s fiction feature debut “Until the Day Ends,” set against the backdrop of Serbia’s student protests. The film will celebrate its world premiere as part of Venice’s Horizons section in September.
The film follows Lena (Lena Trifunović), an anarchist student active in Belgrade’s anti-government movement, and Stefan (Stefan Tarabić), a working-class youth who finds himself, almost by chance, among pro-government loyalists.
Standing on opposite sides of the protests, the pair fall for each other despite the divide, recognizing in one another a restlessness neither can quite name. When a stone is thrown and a policeman struck, Stefan fears he is to blame, and the two flee together to a remote cabin, far from the turmoil of the city.
The film is set against Serbia’s largest student protests in decades, among the largest in Europe, which erupted after the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad killed 16 people. Maksimović drew on personal experience for the story, having grown up in Zemun, a municipality of Belgrade.
“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. Standing on opposite sides of the protests, she and Stefan navigate ideological and intimate conflict in a fractured post-Yugoslav society. Blending conventions of melodrama, comedy, crime and road movie, the film forms an elliptical coming-of-age portrait of adolescence and resistance.”
