3 Weeks After is not for the faint of heart. The timely new film from Miroslav Terzić (Redemption Street, Stitches) takes us inside the nightmares that high school can be made of. And the Serbian director’s third feature, which world premieres on July 7 in the Crystal Globe Competition of the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), does so in haunting fashion that is bristling with tension.
The film starts off with a group of high-school students and their teachers setting off from Serbia for a class trip to Bulgaria. But their bus breaks down, and they find themselves stranded in an old hotel. This is where the quiet and withdrawn Zoza decides to talk about his best friend’s recent suicide. The result is an unsettling cinematic deep dive into adolescent bullying, peer violence and the blurring lines between victim, witness, and perpetrator.
The director co-wrote 3 Weeks After, which features cinematography by Damjan Radovanović, with Vladimir Arsenijević and Bojan Vuletić. The editor is Marko Ferković. The young cast features Jovan Ginić, Klara Hrvanović, Andjela Alavirević, Tihana Lazović Trifunović and Branislav Trifunović.
The film comes from This and That Productions in co-production with Hit and Run Productions, Nightswim, Paul Thiltges Productions, Invictus and Kinorama. Bendita Film Sales is handling sales.
In a conversation with THR, Terzić discussed how, as a father, he felt real urgency to take on the difficult and universal themes of 3 Weeks After, and why he wasn’t afraid to do it in his in-your-face style.
The director knew about bullying and peer violence all too well. “I’m a father of two, so it’s an important issue for me,” he shared. “My children are grown now, but as a parent, I could never look at something like this from a distance.”
3 Weeks After is based on several true stories, and its journey started from there. “When I read an interview with the mother of a deceased boy, she mentioned that the whole class went on a field trip, and for me, that was one of the starting points. I thought about what that excursion would look like with these children, who are 15, 16,” Terzić told THR. “Soon, I started to realize that this is not just a film about peer violence, it’s about violence itself, about how it is learned, tolerated and allowed to grow.”
While writing the script, the creative team couldn’t ignore all the things going on in the world. “We are surrounded by violence,” the filmmaker emphasized. “You turn on the news, open your phone – and it is there. This is the language of today, and children learn it very quickly. They begin to speak it fluently before they fully understand its consequences.”
All in all, creating 3 Weeks After was a journey for him as well. “I realized during the process that we as parents also have a responsibility, because it is easy to turn away when we see or hear something disturbing.”
3 Weeks After doesn’t offer easy answers. For example, key characters are not simply good or bad, nice or evil. “In life, this is not how things work: people are rarely only good or only bad,” noted Terzić. “It depends on the circumstances and on how we respond to them. Young people are still trying to find their place in this society and in this world. I didn’t want to create one guilty person and a crowd of innocent ones. I wanted to try to be truthful. In the film, some children actively participate in violence, some try to resist it, but the majority stay numb and neutral. By staying aside, they give power to those who act violently.” It’s not much different with the grown-ups.
The director’s takeaway: “What matters is whether a community recognizes violence when it begins and sets a boundary around it. When it looks away, violence does not remain neutral; it gains space, legitimacy and power.”
What role does Terzić see for traditional and social media? His hopes are for more voices standing up and speaking up against bullying. “These kids learn from the internet and from TV,” he told THR. “They are exposed to a culture in which humiliation and aggression are constantly turned into content. I do not think films or media can offer a simple solution, but they can refuse silence. They can make us see what we would otherwise choose not to see.”
Fire plays a key role in 3 Weeks After. For example, early on, the protagonist watches a fire burning down an apartment, with noone reacting or interfering. For Terzić, the fire is a metaphor for how humans often only start to care and speak out when we are personally affected. “We are already in the fire, but we don’t feel that flame around us,” he explained. “It doesn’t touch us.”
How did the filmmaker think about a potential happy or tragic ending? “Happy endings are often a kind of fairy tale,” Terzić said, without providing spoilers. “There are moments of happiness and light in the film, of course, but there is also a great deal of darkness. I wanted to provoke the audience, to leave them with something unsettled. The film is direct, at times deliberately uncomfortable, because I did not want it to be forgotten five minutes after the screening.”
In the casting process for 3 Weeks After, the creative team saw around 500-600 kids of different ages, and then it chose 24. “We spoke a lot about everything. But first, we just tried to have fun,” Terzić recalls. The conversations eventually turned to bullying. “We did not begin by asking children to disclose personal experiences. But as trust developed, many of them spoke openly about school, peer pressure, cruelty, silence and the different roles people can find themselves in within a group. Those conversations were extremely revealing.”
The creative team let the young cast members improvise a lot, except for key scenes, such as the one where talk about the suicide of a kid first comes up.
At times, 3 Weeks After feels like we are watching someone documenting this field trip from afar, and this was an approach that gradually became central to the film’s perspective, underlining how children and adults often put distance between themselves and any terrible interactions they witness. “I realized that it looked like we were watching real violence on the street from afar and standing aside,” Terzić told THR. “We are watching from above, on TV, on our mobile phones, and this form of the film carries something of that sensation we know from our media world. I hope that we will provoke some discussion and dialogue about this topic.”
3 Weeks After is “dedicated to Aleksa and Mahir,” two young people whose deaths following peer violence deeply affected public consciousness in the region. Explained Terzić: “Several real cases were among the starting points for the film, including Aleksa’s story, but the film is not a reconstruction of any one of them. My responsibility as a storyteller was to make a film that could move beyond a single case and reach the people who may see themselves as neutral observers.”
“It was a really intense and very emotional journey for me,” Terzić tells THR. “I tried to bring everything I have learned as a filmmaker, and all the urgency I felt as a parent, into this film.”
What’s next for Terzić? “This time, I hope it will be a dark comedy, because, when you see my films so far, they all deal with very, very heavy topics,” he told THR. “The first one dealt with war crimes, the second one with a stolen baby, this third one with peer violence. I realized that I wanted to make something that will bring a smile to people.”
