Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day

1957, Yugoslavia. A hero of the Resistance during WWII, Lavro (Dado Cosic) is now a filmmaker, and engaged in a more subtle war with the Communist regime’s draconian censorship and crackdown on dissidents and homosexuals. Charismatic and justifiably confident in his own abilities, Lavro believes in fighting the good fight, but the government’s network of spies and informers is an amorphous enemy, and he and his friends are in constant danger of denunciation.

Shot in black and white and richly embedded in its film studio setting, Ivona Juka’s powerful drama reminds us how insidiously Orwellian propaganda tactics normalize repression, as brutality breeds fear and subservience. It’s a compelling history lesson, conveyed with passionate conviction.

Note: this film contains scenes of explicit gay sex. Filmmaker Ivona Juka has explained that the movie was in part inspired by an elderly gay relative who had been forced to keep his sexuality secret for most of his life (homosexuality was still illegal in Serbia until the 1990s) and that she believes in this story, Eros is where her protagonist can be, fleetingly, free.