A Chilean widow disrupts an insular, patriarchal society in rural Croatia, circa 1910, in God Will Not Help, a mesmerizing period drama from director Hana Jusic, Croatia’s official entry for the Oscars in the best international feature category.
Jušić evokes gothic drama, Wuthering Heights and even elements of genre horror in her second feature, which stars Chilean actress and director Manuela Martelli as Teresa, a mysterious woman who arrives in a community of sheep herders in rural Croatia, claiming to be the widow of one of their own, who emigrated years ago to seek his fortune. Unable to speak the language, Teresa nevertheless bonds with Milena (Ana Marija Veselcic), another outsider in the community. But her presence is also disruptive, threatening the traditional assumptions of the community’s menfolk.
During a taping of THR Presents, Jusic discussed writing a script designed around mutual misunderstanding, playing with horror tropes, and the film’s modern-day relevance.
This is a bit of a departure from your your first film, Quit Starring at My Plate (2016), which was a present-day modern family drama. What was the spark of the story that initiated it?
For me, this story actually started when I saw Manuela Martelli, who is a Chilean actress and a director. She also has a film this year, which is a Chilean candidate for the Oscar (The Meltdown). I saw her in a short film, and I really wanted to make a film with her, and I started like fantasizing about writing a film for a Chilean, which is quite strange because Croatia and Chile are so far apart. But then I remembered that Croatia back in the beginning of the 20th century had a very big wave of emigration to Chile, and that we have a very big community there. So I thought, maybe I can write a film about a woman that instead of going to Chile comes back from Chile in the 1910s, when it was still very inconceivable of someone coming back from the new world into the old world.
One of the things that’s immediately striking in the film is the language barrier. Martelli’s character Teresa doesn’t speak Croatian. No one she meets speaks Spanish. Fom the beginning, the whole story is built on misunderstanding and miscommunication. Was that something that that fascinated you, creating a story where the main characters don’t actually understand each other?
Sometimes it’s nice to have an obstacle. Before even starting the script, I got obsessed with this idea: how we can communicate outside language and how we can build our own language? How can two people build their own language based on emotions, based on signs. Teresa and Milena, the Croatian character, the only thing they share is the Bible, because Catholicism spread all over the world. So they use biblical symbols, but in their own way, they kind of steal them from the big narrative and use them to communicate. It was very interesting for me to show how sometimes without understanding people we kind of instill in them something we really want them to be. They become our mirror, a hollow box where we can just pour in all all our expectations.
What is it about this story of these two women at the start of the 20th century that you think speaks to a modern audience?
Of course, I don’t think historical films can be of any relevance if it doesn’t correspond to today’s society. As I started writing it, I saw that the issues that are are really concerning me is the position of women. In that society I could show that in a more severe way than today. Also, what really struck me, while writing the film, Croatia, for the first time in its history, had a big wave of immigration, of people especially from the Philippines and Nepal. For the first time we have foreign workers that are different from us. Because we were always the ones who were the foreign workers somewhere else. So I was starting to think and to listen to how people react and tried to incorporate this fear of the unknown into my script.
When Teresa arrives she’s all in black, like an avenging angel. It is a very religious society, and some of the people think maybe she’s a witch, and you play a bit with genre conventions, suggesting that maybe they are right.
I wanted to to play with this trope of the witch because in in in that society in Croatia as anywhere in Europe, in in these rural societies of of that period, it was very common to to accuse women of witchery, the ones that didn’t conform to the to the norms. At one point Teresa even understands this and starts playing with it. She starts taunting them on purpose.
For the first time in my life, I wanted to write actually something that has elements of genre or thriller. I wanted to keep this kind of mystery.
This isn’t a horror film but the atmosphere is almost gothic. It feels a bit like Wuthering Heights.
You’re completely right. Wuthering Heights and the myth of the Bronte sisters was actually a very big inspiration for me. Teresa as a character, this image of troubled woman walking around moors with wind in her hair and in her black dress, was really strong in my head for many years. It’s something of the essence of the film.
The title of the film, God Will Not Help, seems deliberately provocative. What what does the title mean for you?
The title actually from my friend, who is a Croatian poet, Marko Pogacar. It’s the name of a collection of his short stories. I was very jealous of that title. When I started writing the film, I realized this script really goes well with the name, so I asked him, and he lent the title to me.
Croatia is a very Catholic country, and in the last few years we’ve seen a big return of the right wing bringing of these “traditional” values back in a very artificial way. When my film was in a festival in Zagreb, there was a poster of the film one of the main squares and people were constantly crossing out the “Not” in the title, making it God Will Help.
Some people got mad at this title, and I I wanted it to make people mad because I wanted to like challenge this very childish idea that there’s this big God taking care of all of us. The world and history and the lives of people show that it’s not really like this. I wanted to provoke, to show that God will not help, but maybe we can help each other, in the way that Theresa and Milena, who are both outsiders who were not treated well in their lives, help each other.
This edition of THR Presents is sponsored by Kinorama.
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