Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day (Lijepa večer, lijep dan) 👏,
dir. Ivona Juka, 2024 Croatia/Bosnia and Herzegovina/Canada/Cyprus/Poland, 137 min.,
in Croatian with English subtitles
⚠️ content advisory: graphic homophobic violence, sexual violence
Lijepa vecer, lijep dan
Friday, June 27, 2025, 8:30 pm, Herbst Theatre
🇺🇳 International premiere
 |
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day |
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day starts in Nazi-occupied Croatia in 1941, showing some of the students who went on to join the partisans, a highly effective resistance movement. One of the leaders of that movement was Tito, who eventually became the totalitarian dictator of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia. Most of the story takes place in 1957, when Tito was both President and Prime Minister of Yugoslavia. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, you were free to do and say whatever the government wanted you to do and say. Anyone in your life, your co-worker, your neighbor, even your flatmate, could be an informant for the UDBA (secret police). Any slight deviation from official dogma could result in interrogation or worse.
Lovro and Nenad were partisans who became lovers and then partners in film-making, but their talents were assigned to AGITPROP, the department for Agitation and Propaganda. They were joined by a couple of their gay friends from the partisan days of World War II. Within their small circle of family and friends, they are safe and could live and speak freely, but government censors grow increasingly intrusive, and finally UDBA tasks Emir, a party loyalist, with sabotaging the group. Ultimately, the filmmakers are resisting the full weight of the authoritarian state, fighting for the freedom to be, to speak, and to love as they pleased.
It’s a bleak story, with a palpable sense of the oppression they were living under, with all its ubiquitous tentacles in every facet of life. The moments when the men find an opportunity for a sexual connection are manic, making rabbits look calm and sedate by comparison. The walls inexorably close in on them until it all comes to a head. All but the last three minutes or so of the film is in black and white, echoing the colorlessness of life in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
It’s exquisitely well done, but not by any means a light, upbeat film. The protagonists are resisting the relentless and all-encompassing state, with little hope of escape. Highly recommended.
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day was selected as Croatia’s entry for Best International Feature in the 2025 Academy Awards.
• IMDb
• trailer
• official website •