‘Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day’ Review: Voices of Dissent Rise Above Propaganda in Ivona Juka’s Reverberant and Reckless Drama

variety.com:

Stephen Saito It takes a while in “Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day” to reach Barren Island, a notorious penal colony in the former Yugoslavia where no cells were necessary and armed guards counted on the sea to keep those incarcerated in line.

However, a prison without bars reveals itself early on in writer-director Ivona Juka’s stark and occasionally overzealous black-and-white drama.

The film is set in 1957, just after the country escaped the threat of fascism of the Nazis, only to fall into the clutches of communist Josef Broz Tito, who was no less shy about casting off dissenting voices, including those of the gay community.

When Tito maintained his hold on the public’s imagination through propaganda, “Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day” unapologetically offers up a much grimmer image of his leadership through following a pair of romantically intertwined filmmakers Lovro (Dado Cosic) and Nenad (Djordje Galic).