Nine years after her noteworthy debut, Quit Staring at My Plate [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Hana Jušić
ficha de la película], which premiered in the Giornate degli Autori of the 73rd Venice Film Festival, Hana Jušić is back with God Will Not Help [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Hana Jušić
ficha de la película], a similarly themed but differently shaped story, which just premiered in the Locarno Film Festival’s Competition. She told us about the inspirations behind that plot and explained the connection between Chile and Croatia.

Cineuropa: Your first feature, Quit Staring at My Plate, followed a woman suffocated by family and norms, and in God Will Not Help a similar struggle plays out in the past. What drew you to revisit this theme through a historical lens?
Hana Jušić: I think I was trying to reflect on how little has actually changed. Or perhaps there was a period of transformation, but more recently we’ve seen a resurgence of re-traditionalising forces, both within Croatian society and more broadly speaking. There appears to be growing nostalgia for so-called "traditional values," with renewed emphasis on rigid gender roles and stricter social norms. The region of Croatia where the film is set has become especially symbolic for the Croatian far right, which often romanticises traditional life before the “Yugoslav oppression” to serve their reactionary agenda. My intention was to deeply challenge that narrative, to present a critical, almost visceral view. I wanted to highlight how many of the same underlying issues remain unresolved, and how characters like Teresa and Milena could easily be our contemporaries, navigating similar constraints and pressures. The same goes for Stanko, the film’s antagonist, whose role continues to resonate in today’s sociopolitical climate.

Your protagonist is from Chile, not just from another country but another continent. How did that idea come about?
There were a few reasons, and not all of them were story-related. I saw Manuela Martelli in the short film Valparaiso by Carlo Sironi, and I really liked her. Also, historically, many Croats emigrated to Chile during that time for economic reasons. I thought it would be interesting to reverse that journey: to have someone come from the other side of the world. Back then, if someone left for America or South America, they were basically lost, they never came back. So Teresa’s arrival felt almost supernatural; she comes from another dimension. She didn’t speak the language and, back then, people had never even heard a foreign language. In the period I was writing the script, Croatia was becoming a destination for immigrants for the first time in its history, immigrants from countries culturally distant from us, such as Nepal and the Philippines. The xenophobia and fear of the unknown in the script, the cruelness of people who’d never had to deal with difference before, suddenly started feeling very relevant.

What were the biggest challenges in recreating the film’s historical setting?
The film was expensive to make. The Croatian Audiovisual Centre supported us, but we needed co-producers to get the budget to a workable level. My producer, Ankica Jurić Tilić, spent five or six years looking for European funding. While we waited, I did a lot of research in ethnographic museums, institutes and, most importantly, on location. I travelled to the area every summer, visiting the mountains of Dinara and Svilaja in southern Croatia, just inland from the coast. I spoke with locals, mostly older people, who shared memories of their childhoods, which hadn’t changed much from the early 20th century up through the 1970s. These firsthand stories shaped many elements in the film – the social structure, daily life, the finer details.

You wrote in your director’s note about exploring human solidarity within rigid value systems built on a feverish desire to belong or to possess. Is it true that solidarity is only possible without that desire?
It seems to me that the desire to belong often depends on drawing boundaries, boundaries that exclude the other, and this exclusion leads to a lack of empathy for and sometimes hate of the other. Similarly, the impulse toward possession – of people, status, or identity – ultimately undermines the possibility for genuine solidarity. The film’s ending affirms female solidarity; I wanted the two women to recognise each other and realise that they can turn to one another and help each other where God will not. They don’t need to be saved.

Both of your films depict closed, oppressive social units. How much of that comes from your own experience or what you observe in Croatian society?
A lot. I carry the mentality of southern Croatia within me, where people don’t really let each other live freely. Even the title of Quit Staring at My Plate refers to that: people always interfering, always judging. In Croatia, people are very judgmental and in constant fear of anything that’s different. Stanko, for example, is a character who represents this voice of the community, this collective judgment. My films inevitably reflect this reality.