Belgrade Protest Drama 'Until the Day Ends' Runs From the Parable Trap

Jelena Maksimović's debut fiction feature "Until the Day Ends" has landed in main competition at Tokyo, after premiering in Venice's Horizons program and screening in Vienna and Hamburg. Not bad for a first narrative outing from a director previously known for documentaries.

The Serbian writer-director made her name on the docfest circuit with "Taurunum Boy" (2019) and "Homelands" (2020). Her fiction debut trades the safety of a political parable for something flintier. Two young people bond through a rash act of rebellion amid mass student protests in Belgrade, despite outwardly incompatible ideologies. The premise promises a tidy "why can't we all get along" homily. The execution declines the invitation.

What drives the story?

The film is set against real-life anti-government demonstrations that swept Serbia in early 2025. Those protests followed the deaths of 16 people in 2024, after a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad. Maksimović keys her street-level, vérité-style (handheld, documentary-like) grit into that unrest, and it reads as authentically current rather than retrofitted.

Her characters are leanly drawn. Lena (Lena Trifunović), a 20-year-old firebrand activist, is all in on the protests. Her college comrades admire her. Her older brother Milan (Miodrag Dragicevic), a staunch right-winger, mocks her as an idealistic naif. His friends join the teasing — except Stefan (Andrija Krivokapić), a 22-year-old working-class punk whose pro-government stance never quite convinces anyone, possibly himself included.

Lena taunts him back. The connection hardens at the demonstration, where the two are complicit in an act of defiance: throwing a cobblestone at a policeman, badly injuring him. They skip town for the night.

How does Maksimović shoot it?

Restlessly. The film opens on a virtuoso long take, roaming the shadowed hallways of a university building that has become a campsite for displaced, rebellious students. Insurgent streaks of red cut through the gloom. DP Paul Spengemann and Maksimović embrace what one might call epic escapism: roving, kinetic camerawork punctuated with bursting lens flare — enough, per the original review, to make Janusz Kaminski (Steven Spielberg's longtime cinematographer) blush.

The mostly non-professional ensemble feeds the docudrama spirit. The narrative momentum crests at the protest, where Maksimović deploys her most dynamic trickery, including a shot from the perspective of the offending stone itself. A film confident enough to give the cobblestone a POV shot is a film announcing its formal ambitions.

Does the second half hold?

Partly. As a more intimate two-hander, the film is less urgent than in its first half. It stays compelling through the push-pull chemistry of its two leads, who are alike in combative vulnerability and little else. Trifunović, a riveting newcomer, is the real find: unpredictable in her coiled-up physicality, alternately commanding and petulant.

There is no capitulation, no come-to-Jesus moment. "Until the Day Ends" is not an outright romance, nor a tale of gathering resistance. It finds human emotions and obligations sometimes messily at odds with political ideals — its teachings, if any, learned on the run.

Maksimović's approach is propelling the film some distance on the festival circuit, and it promises bigger things from a director who has already turned a debut into a Venice-to-Tokyo run.