The producer of Croatia‘s Oscar contender claims the film is getting shortchanged by Croatian officials because the film’s themes, including the oppression of homosexuals by the former communist regime in Yugoslavia, are not to the government’s liking.
Ivona Juka’s Beautiful Evening Beautiful Day was the unanimous pick of Croatia’s 12 film professional associations to represent the country in the Oscar race for best international feature. But the promotional funding provided by the Croatian Audiovisual Center to market the movie to Academy voters is far less than Croatia’s Oscar contender from last year.
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day received €69,550 ($73,250) in promotional funding, less than half the budget granted to Dubravka Turić’s Traces last year (the film was not nominated). More egregiously, Nebojša Slijepčević’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, an Oscar contender for best life action short film, received more than twice that amount, €153,000 ($161,140) for its awards campaign.
“Our film deals with difficult topics from our country’s past and features explicit LGBTIQ+ content, so I cannot shake the feeling that the Croatian Ministry of Culture, along with the Croatian Audiovisual Center, cut our budget with clear intent to weaken our chances in the Oscar run,” the film’s producer, Anita Juka, said in a statement. “We are in a position where we need to cut back on the whole strategy and advertising, and this close to the actual [Oscar] voting. It’s ridiculous that the Croatian Audiovisual Center made such a disproportionate allocation of the promotional budget between a feature film and a short film.”
Beautiful Evening Beautiful Day, a black-and-white drama set in the 1950s explores the persecution of Yugoslavia’s LGBTQ+ community under Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito. The film follows a group of friends, former students who left university to join the partisan forces fighting the Nazis in WW2, who become acclaimed filmmakers after the war. But they come under increased scrutiny because of their sexual orientation. Lovro, a free-spirited director played by Dado Ćosić, is sent to an island penal colony, his spirit broken.
The plot is inspired by the real-life cases of some 500 gay men who were persecuted and imprisoned under Tito’s regime. Some were sent to the country’s notorious Barren Island, a penal colony in the northern Adriatic Sea originally designed to hold political prisoners. Yugoslavia’s ruling Communist Party officially criminalized homosexuality in 1959, a ban that was lifted in the republics of Croatia and Slovenia in 1977, and in the rest of the former Yugoslavia only following the country’s break-up in the 1990s.
Reached by The Hollywood Reporter for comment, a spokesperson for the Croatian Audiovisual Center claimed the film’s producers submitted their application for awards funding “very late in the game” and that “only a few” board members were able to watch the film before approving the grant. The spokesperson said while the grant level was lower than that of the previous two years, “it is unclear whether [more marketing money] has made a difference” in results at the Oscars. Since its independence in 1991 following the Yugoslav War, Croatia has never been nominated for an Academy Award in the best international feature category.
The Croatian Audiovisual Center said the higher grant for The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent was because the film won the Palme d’Or for best short in Cannes this year and is “a matter of great national pride” in Croatia. The spokesperson also noted the film’s producers “submitted a very convincing application very early on.”
With its tight promotional budget, Beautiful Evening Beautiful Day is instead carrying out a guerilla awards campaign, which has included screening the film for Academy voters in L.A. this week.
“With this budget, we can hardly cover our basic promotional needs, which is hiring a publicist, booking a cinema in the U.S., and covering our travel and accommodation, let alone consider any advertising,” said director Ivona Juka in a statement. “It’s disrespectful not to be treated equally, which is ironic, as equality is the main topic of our film.”
The Academy will announce the longlist of international feature contenders on December 17, with Oscar nominations on January 17. The 97th Academy Awards will be held on March 3.
You can check out the trailer for Beautiful Evening Beautiful Day below.