Tribeca prizewinner Darko Lungulov (“Here and There”) has wrapped production on “1970,” a coming-of-age drama set against the backdrop of President Nixon’s visit to the former Yugoslavia during the Vietnam War. The film will take part in the Agora Works in Progress strand at the Thessaloniki Film Festival before heading to Tallinn’s Baltic Event industry showcase later this month.
“1970” follows 13-year-old Draško, who — after being abandoned by his parents — runs away with the rebellious 16-year-old Eržika. Drifting from place to place, swept up amid a roiling climate of anti-war protests, rebellion, free love, wild rock concerts, drugs and decadent parties, his desperate journey home becomes an awakening of heartbreak, loss and freedom.
The film is written and directed by Lungulov, who shares a producing credit with Snezana van Houwelingen. It’s produced by This and That Productions (Serbia), Papa Films (Serbia), Mirage Film (Hungary), Samsa Film (Luxembourg) and PomPom Film (Croatia), with financing and support from Film Center Serbia, the Hungarian National Film Institute, Film Fund Luxembourg, the Croatian Audiovisual Center, Film Fund Vojvodina and Creative Europe MEDIA.
Speaking to Variety in Thessaloniki, Lungulov explains that while his period drama is set more than 50 years in the past, “it is 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. Pointing to recent events in his native Serbia, where after two years of struggle, a student protest movement ousted longtime strongman Aleksandar Vučić last month, Lungulov says that “that possibility came incredibly to life again.”
The Belgrade-born director, who studied filmmaking in New York, is best known for “Here and There,” which won the Best NY Narrative Award at Tribeca in 2009 and was Serbia’s submission for the foreign-language Oscar that year. The film, which contrasted the adventures of an enterprising young Serbian in New York with the experiences of an aging New Yorker in Belgrade, was praised by Variety’s Ronnie Scheib 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 follow-up, the tragicomedy “Monument to Michael Jackson,” premiered at Karlovy Vary.
Lungulov’s last film was the 2023 documentary “A Fleeting Dream,” which followed the rock band Yu Grupa — a long-running musical act that, coincidentally, was formed in 1970. His latest will also incorporate documentary elements, with “1970” utilizing a mix of “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.”
Mirroring the political climate of that time, with raucous anti-Vietnam War protests greeting Nixon’s visit to Yugoslvaia, Lungulov notes that his two young 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 railway station disaster in 2024 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.” It’s that echo of the past in the present day, he says, that makes his film so timely.
“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.”
The Thessaloniki Film Festival runs Nov. 5 – 15.
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