God Will Not Help (Bog Neće Pomoći), the sophomore feature from Croatian writer-director Hana Jušić (Quit Staring at My Plate), is not your typical period piece. Far from it!
“Teresa, a Chilean woman, comes to a firmly structured and isolated mountain community of Croatian shepherds in the early 20th century, claiming to be the widow of their émigré brother,” reads a synopsis for the movie, whose cast is led by Manuela Martelli, Ana Marija Veselčić, and Filip Đurić, and also features Mauro Ercegović Gracin, and Nikša Butijer. “Her arrival has a significant impact on the dynamics among the members of the community and brings with it unrest as well as inspiration for other women,” especially Milena.
The co-production between Croatia, Italy, Romania, Greece, France, and Slovenia, had its world premiere at the recent Locarno Film Festival, where it won Martelli and Veselčić best competition performance awards. It moved on to the competition lineup of the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, where it created further buzz.
God Will Not Help, from producer Ankica Jurić Tilić and a group of co-producers, features cinematography by Jana Plećaš, editing by Jan Klemsche, costumes by Katarina Pilić, production design
by Laura Boniand, and music by Stavros Evangelou, Iris Asimakopoulou, and Vasilis Chontos.
“I wanted to explore what true human solidarity and empathy might mean within the framework of rigid value systems that are based on the feverish desire either to belong or possess,” according to a director’s note.
At the Sarajevo festival, Jušić talked to THR about putting female characters and religion into the spotlight in God Will Not Help, how the sheep in the movie affected its shooting schedule, and what the auteur plans to do next.
Quit Staring at My Plate and God Will Not Help have different settings, but they share some key themes, right?
Yeah, some of the voice might be similar. And I think the similarities are mostly in the characters and the setup of the characters, because in both, I have female figures who are outcasts from their society, from the family, and the rest of the people are acting like a pack of wolves, trying to tear them apart.
In Quit Staring at My Plate, the ending didn’t set my character free, and it bothered me for many years that I left this character in a toxic environment. So in God Will Not Help, I decided to do something different.
‘God Will Not Help’
Courtesy of Kinorama
You shot God Will Not Help in the mountains. How nice and how difficult was it to shoot in nature?
Luckily, we didn’t sleep in the mountains. There is a town nearby where we went every night. But it was kind of difficult to shoot, I will not try to diminish it. I really wanted nature to be an important aspect of the film, and I wanted us all to be immersed in it. But nature is nature, and a mountain is a mountain. We are just small particles on this big mountain. And sometimes I really felt like we were intruders. You cannot not feel that you are an intruder there, with all the cars and all of us there, and you have this beautiful surrounding around us. And I wanted, in the viewing experience, for this nature to engulf you as a viewer, yeah.
It’s about society and nature, like in westerns, where you have nature, and people building society, but actually, this society brings more chaos and violence.
How early did you know that your protagonist would be a Chilean woman, just like the actress
Manuela Martelli, and why did you want her to be a foreigner?
I knew it from the beginning because I saw Manuela in a short film, Valparaiso by Carlo Sironi, and I liked her so much. Croatia also has strong immigration to Chile, so I thought this could be used.
Tell me a bit about why you like to feature strong female characters?
This element of female rebelliousness is very important to me. I really wanted not to just show these women having a hard time, but also [perform] these small acts of rebelliousness. I like, for instance, that Milena is lazy and she doesn’t want to do anything around the house, and everyone says she’s so lazy. But this laziness is her small act of rebellion. This is something I really enjoy. And in the end, I wanted to give them a big rebellion.
Looking at your collaborators and crew, you also have a strong female creative team behind the camera. How do you know them, or how did you find them?
It’s very nice, because my DOP and I, and also my costume designer and my editor, who is a man, have worked together since we were students. We did all the short films together, and Quit Staring at My Plate, and now this one. And Ankica, the producer, also produced Quit Staring at My Plate. So we are mostly female and always work together, and we are the core of the film.
director Hana Jušić
Courtesy of Glorija Lizde
Tell me a little bit about the religious aspect of the film. Why is religion one of the key themes? Does that have to do with your home, Croatia?
Croatia has this very strong far-right movement now that is growing, and it’s very intertwined with the Catholic Church and religion. The church is very much into politics. Priests often talk about politics. For me, this is a really big problem there. We had this Croatian Nazi regime. And now this movement intertwines with the church. It’s scary.
So, I wanted to address this fake religion in a way that is represented by some of the characters in the film. But also I wanted to address this spirituality, this more individual, intimate spirituality in Ilija’s (Đurić) character.
The two main female characters in God Will Not Help don’t speak the same language, so Teresa learns the language of her new surroundings, which leads to all sorts of interesting scenes. Noam Chomsky and others have written about the role language plays in our understanding of the world. Why did you want to give this language aspect such attention?
I wanted Teresa to learn some words that would help her tell her secret. Also, this world they inhabit is very simple. You mentioned Chomsky. Their world is their sheep, the mountain, and there is the knife – it is about all the useful things and objects that surround them. So I wanted her to learn their world through the words for very concrete things. The shepherd’s life is very concrete.
Since you mentioned the sheep. How did all the sheep affect your shoot?
When we shot, we would have one take, and if this take wasn’t good, we needed to do another take, and we had to put all the sheep back into the same position. So then, people were running after the sheep, trying to put them into the same position for the shot. So it took us a lot of time to do the mise-en-scène of the sheep. And we ended up doing seven shots a day, instead of the 15 we had planned. Overall, we shot for 36 days.
The ‘God Will Not Help’ team at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
The music in the movie is not shepherds’ music but searing, more industrial-sounding. What was the thought behind that?
My editor, Jan, who is a music editor as well, and I were talking and really didn’t want to have the typical music of the area and the period, like shepherd’s music. We wanted to add another layer with the music, music that is underlining emotion. We just wanted to have scenes where the music is overwhelming in a way, and our reference was mostly [the band] Tangerine Dream from the ’70s.
So we were trying to find someone who does this kind of music today. And because we are a Greek co- production, we looked for Greek composers. So, Jan went on the internet and looked at small labels, clubs, and asked everyone in Greece. And then we met Stavros and Iris, and Vasilis, who are the composers. Our collaboration was really perfect. We never saw each other beyond Zoom, but they were amazing.
Do you already have an idea for your next film?
Yeah, because it took me nine years between Quit Staring at My Plate and this film, I would really like to make another film a bit faster. I already have one idea. I would like to make a film about an actress who is a very bad actress and is trying really hard. This idea has stayed with me for some time now, and I will try to write it.
Where did this idea come from?
I’m always obsessed with actors because acting is something so connected to you. I mean, we all have jobs, but acting is really you giving your body, your voice, your face, your everything, to do your job. And I have always wondered if actors who are not good are aware that they are not good. Do you feel it in your body? Do you go to your job every day thinking, “Okay, I was really bad today”? How painful is it? I think actors are very vulnerable. And this vulnerability is interesting to me
‘God Will Not Help’
Courtesy of Kinorama
Is there anything else you would like to mention or highlight?
My costume designer yesterday told me that God Will Not Help is a costume film, but no one ever mentions the costumes when they write about this film. So I just wanted to say that for us, these costumes were extremely important. Especially in Croatia, in all the period films, everyone always seems like they are in new clothes that came straight from the museum. And I really wanted to make them dirty, so that their costumes look really worn by time. It was very important to us to get this authenticity. While writing the script and preparing the film, I thought, “If their costumes look like they are new, everything will be completely unbelievable.”
Teresa’s black dress is quite memorable…
This dress was also one of my first motifs to write the script. It was this woman in a black dress, because I’m a big fan of gothic novels and things like that.