Hana Jušić: We spent evenings in a hut while wolves howled outsid

Director Hana Jušić is coming to Sarajevo with the film GOD WILL NOT HELP, about an unusual Chilean woman who, at the beginning of the 20th century, arrives in an isolated shepherd community in the Croatian mountains, claiming to be the widow of their brother who had emigrated. The film will have its regional premiere at the National Theater Sarajevo tonight at 7 p.m.

 

 

[Text Wrapping Break]“Quit Staring at My Plate” had a fairly rich festival journey, but I felt somewhat lost and drained throughout the process. It seemed to me, “Okay, now I’ve made this film and said everything I had to say, that’s it from me.” I was afraid to start writing something new, and the films I watched while traveling to festivals didn’t inspire me. It felt like we were all telling the same, or at least very similar, stories, all predictable once the film started. So it wasn’t until around 2018 that I began writing again. I wanted this to be something completely different from anything I had done before, a meditative and stylistically demanding film with elements of a western.  

 

 

Torino ScriptLab was extremely useful, mainly because of my mentor Francoise von Roy, who, encouraged me not to put the script into tried-and-true templates, not to make it “more correct,” and to dare to make the film I had set out to write. That is rarely among mentors at such workshops and script doctors in general. A week after arriving at the Cinéfondation in Paris, a very strict lockdown began, during which I spent two and a half months confined in an apartment with five complete strangers. That experience felt more like Big Brother than an artistic residency.  

 

 

I studied English and loved Victorian literature, and I’ve always loved James Ivory’s films. That led me to wonder why I couldn’t make a period costume film, naturally set in the historical context of my own country. The basic idea in my head was a scene of a woman in black wandering the wilds, inspired by Catherine Earnshaw from “Wuthering Heights”. I placed her in the Dinaric region because the concept of transhumant shepherding, where shepherds spend the summer isolated in the mountains, was narratively very intriguing to me.  

 

 

I combined scholarly literature, ethnographic accounts, and fiction, but what inspired me the most were conversations with older people from the region about their childhoods or family traditions. That’s where I found scenes I directly included in the film, and the shepherds’ way of life became closer and more tangible to me. My cinematographer Jana Plećaš, costume designer Katarina Pilić, and I spent several days on Dinara with two shepherds, without electricity or water, going with them to pasture and spending evenings in a hut while wolves howled outside. I’ve always felt that I learned everything in life from books; after this research, I learned to appreciate lived experience.  

 

 

I first saw Manuela in 2018 in Carlo Sironi’s film “Valparaiso”, and she was the direct reason I began writing a film with a Chilean protagonist. I decided to write without worrying whether it could ever be realized, which is perhaps good advice for screenwriters - you can be free and follow what genuinely interests you. Later, it’s easier to cut things that aren’t feasible when the idea has strengthened in a free environment. Since Teresa was born from Manuela, not the other way around, I can say I was drawn to her strength, boldness, and a certain wildness in a boyish body.  

 

 

It was important for me to create characters who are well-adjusted to a traditionally patriarchal system, as well as those who are outsiders in that oppressive society. For some, Teresa is a threat and a potentially disruptive element, while for Ilija and Milena, each in their own way, Teresa symbolizes potential escape and salvation. They are strangers in their own community, and Teresa, as a foreigner speaking a different language and coming from darkness with no roots or family, represents the possibility that another world is possible. That is actually a key driver of the entire plot.  

 

 

Language was extremely important to me because I wanted to explore communication and the building of emotional closeness without language. I wanted to see how Teresa and Milena, and Teresa and Ilija, inscribe themselves into each other, how they mirror one another, how they feel simultaneously and construct illusions about each other. I also wanted to explore how not knowing the language can evoke insecurity in an immigrant, placing them in an inferior position, showing how easily language can alienate people and turn them into a threat.  

 

 

I remember being young and just discovering contemporary art films. I recall watching “The Blacks”, the first Croatian film I saw in a cinema with great pride, listening to Yorgos Lanthimos’s masterclass and thinking, “This is my idol,” and watching films like “Parque Via” and “La nana”, which sparked my deep love for Latin American cinema. Sonja Tarokić and I were already beginning to develop our film “Pametnice”, which we later shot as part of the Sarajevo City of Film project. To this day, it remains the funniest and most beloved film I’ve made.