Last Day On Earth

“Last  day on Earth” began as a dream.  And what better way to make a movie in  this day and age when everything around us seems to have been  virtualized, from the air we breathe and the food we eat to the bank  transactions we make?  There i s no better way to reach out to the fiction but  to steal a script idea from the last place on Earth one still feels at  home with and that’s one’s own unconsciousness.
Thus, one fateful Balkan evening in the February of 2019 I fell asleep  troubled by the fact that all my previous attempts to make a movie fell  through. The next morning, as though in a fairy tale, I rose and shone  with a vision in my mind. In the interim 10 hours something had happened. Overnight I was apparently visited by the same muses from Mount  Olympus who had themselves been following in the footsteps of Sir Alfred  Hitchcock who kept a pen and paper next to his pillow in case some  noteworthy movie idea came his way in his slumbers.
So inspired by chance and by risk - taking it all I  took a pen. And what I jotted down on a notepad on my own night table that morning were the following words: ”Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds the apocalypse and the girl“.
The  concept seemed fabulously conventional, seen millions of times before,  yet with a loose screw in it and therefore original .
And the magic simplicity of it all seemed to work its spell not just on me but on the other people as well.
I  called my DOP Mr Nenad Mladenovic in Washington DC. The script I had  written in a single breath the same day I had a dream he seemed to like  very much. My friend and actress Milica Stefanovic found it fascinating  too.
On the spur of the moment, she suggested an  up-and-coming Serbian character actor Igor Bencina for the male lead.  And he also liked the script and he was excited by the notion of a  single 10 minute take in which a man and a woman fall in love at the first sight while all around them the Apocalypse is gathering pace. He  joined our crew. And other professional sleepwalkers followed:
Miroslav  Lakobrija, an expert and award winning special effects whiz, Srdjan  Bajski, the sound recordist and the sound designer and the composer of
“Killer Mermaid“ (2014) fame Nikola Nikita Jeremic .
And  this is how a momentum for the subsequent film gathered pace. And  therefore the world of “The last day on Earth“ had to have a dream logic  and was created almost on its own accord, lopsided, strange,  colorful and by itself, and within its own perfect  storm blitzkrieg set of rules.
The result is now in front of you - a curious Balkan baroque genre hybrid .
Within  this 10 minutes of film shot on real film you have a twisted vision of  two people falling in love with each other while the outside world falls  apart around them. But not just that. In a single movement of the  handheld camera on the easy rig you can see the History of cinema  unraveling.
From the light coda of the first cafe  scene that in equal measure recalls Chaplin one reel comedies and Jean  Luc Godard’s “Vivre sa Vie “ to the darker hews of flocks of  Hitchcockian crows and ravens from “ The Birds” all the way down to the  gathering doomsday mist in which anything can happen borrowed from John Carpenter's “The Fog”.
And that is perhaps the final underlying moral of this unusual film curiously in sync with our end - times.
Our  horror today is not in our powerlessness but in our omnipotence. Horror  is not in the fact that God has abandoned us or that we have abandoned  God. The horror is that we think that we are “It”. We are God . And our  ultimate disaster because of it resides not in the fact that nothing  can be done but rather in its very opposite! Today anything can happen,  all is possible! There is no limit to our fantasy so there is no end to  our nightmares…

Nikola  Nikita Jeremić epitomizes versatility when it comes to video games and  soundtracks for horror movies to heavy  metal garage sound. He is an  original. Based in Belgrade, Serbia he  works and thinks globally. His  soundtrack for the feature horror film  “Killer Mermaid “ (2014) was  well received on the festival circuit.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3171764/ 

Slobodan Mihajlovic

is award winning sound  designer who has worked with some of the most important European film  directors of recent times, including Emir Kusturica and Kristi Puiu.  His  background in classical music and radio drama has  enabled  him  throughout his career to develop powerful soundscapes   that are  both  cinematic and   Symphonic. His sense of sound is deeply instinctive yet  highly sophisticated and precise. And there is always a strong focus on  tension between sonic detail and overall  atmosphere, between punk and  aural arias. His unique collaboration with Rajko Radovic on “ Last day  on Earth “ has delivered a powerfully   apocalyptic soundscape that  contributed greatly to overall dystopian vision of the film. He also has  a tenure  as a professor of sound design at the Faculty of Dramatic  Arts ( FDU ) in Belgrade, Serbia.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3374572/

Nemanja Ceranic
 

is uniquely talented cinematic homo ludens, multifaceted filmmaker who excelled as much in the realm of picture cutting and sound editing  as  he left an indelible mark on scripts for the films he directed,  composed  music for and acted in. His short films “Stocar“ (Cattleman, 2013) and “Soba Smrti“ (Dead room, 2016) were both well  received on the festival circuit. While his debut feature “Lihvar“ (Loan shark, 2021) was praised by critics and was awarded top accolades  on 14 different film festivals worldwide. His contribution as an editor on “ The Last Day on Earth “ was crucial for musical, horror genre structure of the film.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6667592/