Darko Lungulov Wraps '1970': A Coming-of-Age Drama About Now

Darko Lungulov, the Tribeca-winning director of "Here and There," has wrapped production on "1970," a coming-of-age drama set during President Nixon's visit to the former Yugoslavia at the height of the Vietnam War. The film enters the Agora Works in Progress strand at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, which runs Nov. 5–15, before moving to Tallinn's Baltic Event industry showcase later this month.

The story follows 13-year-old Draško, abandoned by his parents, who runs away with the rebellious 16-year-old Eržika. They drift from place to place through a roiling climate of anti-war protests, rebellion, free love, wild rock concerts, drugs and decadent parties. His desperate journey home, the synopsis states, becomes an awakening of heartbreak, loss and freedom.

Lungulov wrote and directs, and shares a producing credit with Snezana van Houwelingen. The production spans five companies: This and That Productions and Papa Films (Serbia), Mirage Film (Hungary), Samsa Film (Luxembourg) and PomPom Film (Croatia). Financing comes from Film Center Serbia, the Hungarian National Film Institute, Film Fund Luxembourg, the Croatian Audiovisual Center, Film Fund Vojvodina and Creative Europe MEDIA.

Why call a period film 'a story about today'?

Speaking to Variety in Thessaloniki, Lungulov insists that a drama set more than 50 years in the past is, in his words, "a story about today."

"The film takes us to a time when young people believed they could change the world — something we seem to have forgotten," the director says.

He points to recent events in his native Serbia, where a student protest movement ousted longtime strongman Aleksandar Vučić last month after two years of struggle. That outcome, Lungulov says, meant "that possibility came incredibly to life again."

There is a caveat worth attaching to every promise of timeliness: the film was shot before that political outcome, and no festival audience has yet seen a finished cut. What is certain is the casting. Lungulov notes that his two leads — Andrija Femić, who plays Draško, and Lilla Gregus, who plays Eržika — were both "very active in the student movement" that brought down Vučić. At the time of filming, Gregus was a 22-year-old student at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, the Serbian town whose 2024 railway station disaster jumpstarted the protest movement. On one occasion, Lungulov himself joined the young actor and her fellow students at a demonstration after a rehearsal for "1970."

"I feel this story is about today — young people searching for their voice in a hopeless world and refusing to be broken by bullying authorities, which feels like our last hope in today's scary times," he says. "And the Serbian students brought that hope back to us in Serbia, and perhaps to the world."

What does the film look like?

Lungulov's method mixes forms. "1970" combines "real and fake home movies, newly shot 16mm and digital footage," he says. "It is a film based on my own memories, and I wanted to create the hero's inner world, his memories and the atmosphere of 1970 through the film's internal language."

The Belgrade-born director, who studied filmmaking in New York, won the Best NY Narrative Award at Tribeca in 2009 for "Here and There," which was also Serbia's foreign-language Oscar submission that year. Variety's Ronnie Scheib praised it as a "laid-back character study [that] accrues small epiphanies with patient care, its mordant Eastern European humor tempered by a gentler sense of postwar absurdity." His 2014 tragicomedy "Monument to Michael Jackson" premiered at Karlovy Vary. His last film was the 2023 documentary "A Fleeting Dream," about the rock band Yu Grupa — an act formed, coincidentally, in 1970.

Whether "1970" lands as history, memoir or political echo will become clear once buyers in Thessaloniki and Tallinn see the footage.