“3 Weeks After”, an interview with director Miroslav Terzić

Serbian director Miroslav Terzić has just premiered his third feature, 3 Weeks After, in the Crystal Globe Competition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2026.

This relentlessly cruel story about bullying, at once fascinating and hard to watch, implacable and extremely layered, deeply anchored in reality and allegorical in its very striking and masterful aesthetics, garnered the Europa Cinemas Label.

The jury, unanimously “captivated right from the first shot and until the very end”, was impressed by the “remarkably strong and authentic performance” delivered by the ensemble cast, the choice of portraying the lives of “adolescents today through their own eyes, allowing their voices and perspectives to shape the narrative in a genuine and convincing way,” and found “Miroslav Terzić’s filmmaking stunning in every aspect of its craft.”

“The film,” the jury concluded, “urges us to truly hear young people, be there for them and not look away!”

A project born from a single sentence, ten years ago

The project, Terzić explains, started over ten years ago, when Branislav Trifunović, the producer of the film (and actor, in the role of the maths teacher supervising the school trip next to the head teacher played by Tihana Lazović), and Vladimir Arsenijević, the screenwriter, started to work on this script about peer violence and called him.

“We decided not to make some kind of docu story on one specific case,” says the director. Within the research material, he remembers, there was one sentence, from the mother of a boy who committed suicide, who said that the class went on an excursion three weeks after the fact, so “we tried to imagine what that excursion would look like.”

Not just bullying, but a violent society

However, continues Miroslav Terzić, “as we tried to find the best way to tell the story, we realised it was not just about peer violence, but about a violent society, about violence, and we live in that society. When you turn around, watch TV or Internet or whatever, there is violence all around us, and we were struck by that normalisation of violence.”

“So we tried to show the audience that they are in the fire too – which is why there is a fire in the beginning, but no one is doing anything to prevent it –, that we are in the fire right now, at this very moment, but we are turning our heads [the other way].”

The responsibility of adults, and the fading of empathy

If the film certainly includes a commentary on the current young generation present in the film, it also suggests that the responsibility lies with the grown-ups, and with society as a whole: “They have grown up with the Internet, their phone is like a new organ for them, and they see the world through that, and what we serve them through that is disturbing, so we cannot expect… Somehow, empathy […] is slowly fading away from this society, [it’s almost] extinct, so I think that that we must teach them to feel again, not to be afraid to have real feelings.”

“They are protected by their phones and live some kind of alternative life, so we must teach them to see violence and to stand up against it, even if it’s hard, and help whoever needs help. Because in every story about bullying, there are three sides, not two: there is the bully, there is the victim, and there is a third side, and it is the biggest one, which is that of the spectators, the people who are watching and do not interfere. It is them who let the bullies have all the power.”

“[…] We gave them that power by not protecting the weak, the people who need help. […] I’m blaming society, because when tragedies happen, everyone talks about it and after three days, everyone forgets and continues on with their life, but this is not enough time to deal with that tragedy, [and it means we are not doing] anything to prevent a new tragedy.”

A striking, allegorical aesthetic to multiply perspectives

The striking aesthetics of 3 Weeks After also takes the subject to another, more abstract or allegorical dimension, beyond the Balkans angle or the generational and societal comment.

“We wanted to tackle this topic from many different angles,” Terzić points out, “and leave it to the audience to decide how they choose to approach it. […] There are a lot of underlying layers and a lot of metaphorical and allegorical elements, and we break the fourth wall too, three times, in the movie.”

We also discuss the moral reflection stemmed by the “they made me do it” argument, the animality the group reverts to, the implications of the inherent gregariousness of humans, the purifying symbolism of the cave where the guilt-ridden victim finds a refuge, and the longing for connection and embrace expressed in the magnificent ending.

Plot