Terzić's '3 Weeks After' Premieres at Karlovy Vary
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Miroslav Terzić directed "3 Weeks After," his third feature, which premieres July 7 at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival as an official Crystal Globe Competition selection; the film is co-produced by Serbia, Bulgaria, Italy, Croatia and Luxembourg.
- "3 Weeks After" is inspired by true events and dedicated to Aleksa and Mahir, two young boys who died by suicide one year apart; the story follows a school trip to the Bulgarian mountains three weeks after a classmate named Andrij dies by suicide.
- Terzić cast the group of 24 kids from more than 500 actors, choosing mostly non-professionals; instead of reading lines he asked about their school experiences, and two young people told him they had been "villains" in peer violence themselves.
- Cinematographer Damjan Radovanović keeps the camera at a distance during on-screen beatings — a deliberate choice Terzić said mirrors how viewers watch violence "from the side, from above, on our phone," turning violence into spectacle.
- Terzić said conversations about suicide in Bulgaria happen far too late: "We are already in some kind of fire, but we don't realize. We don't notice the fire," adding that everyday language among young people has become the language of violence.
- Terzić was writing the film in 2023 when a mass shooting occurred at a Serbian school — the country where he was born — calling it a moment of realizing "it's not a film, it's real life."
- "3 Weeks After" was written by Terzić with Vladimir Arsenijević and Bojan Vuletić and was shot using long takes and improvisation with the young cast.
Why it matters: By placing a Crystal Globe competition debut around the deaths of two real boys and drawing on confessional casting interviews with former perpetrators, Terzić is using a festival platform to argue that Bulgarian society normalizes peer violence and delays suicide conversations — giving the film a chance to function as a public reckoning rather than just a festival title.
