Director Thea Gajic on Grief, Memory and the Making of Her Debut Film Surviving Earth (2026)

Thea Gajic’s debut film Surviving Earth (2026) weaves together a daughter’s grief and a father’s music, reassembling a picture of a culture which has been torn by war and then slowly patched back together from fragments by its characters. Gajic speaks candidly about resurrecting her father through casting, costume and rewritten lyrics; navigating a British film industry uneasy with a masculine, volatile lead; and her work reconnecting with a culture that at one point felt scarce and out of reach.

Director Thea Gajic photographed behind the scenes of her debut film Surviving Earth (2026). Image credit Thea Gajic.

Your debut film Surviving Earth (2026) really felt like you were piecing together recollected memories of your father. How much of what we see came from your own memories of him, and how much was built from other cultural references to create this world?

Honestly, all of that is drawn directly from my own experiences with him, whether staying with him, or visiting my grandparents together. The character's behaviour, body language, and sensibilities were all based directly on my dad. The only things I had to invent were the moments where he's alone. I had to imagine what he'd be doing based on everything I knew about him, and on conversations with friends who could fill in gaps I didn't have. So the scenes where the character is alone are the ones I made up, but even those were heavily shaped by what I believed, even if I couldn't confirm it.

The film had external funding and a producer, Aleksandra Bilić, who's Balkan herself. Were those external influences shaping some of the grittier cultural elements, or was that more a direct product of your own memories?

The benefit of having Aleksandra as producer, and working with a cast from that region, was really felt in scenes where I'm not fluent enough to have caught every nuance of the language and they were able to adjust dialogue accordingly. In the scenes spoken in Serbian, it was great watching the cast collaborate with each other to find the best, most realistic way to have a given argument. There was a nuance in those scenes that I just don't have access to as I wasn't raised in that region, and my dad didn't teach me the language as I didn't live with him day-to-day.

Your film seems really centred on being caught between two places and two homes. What drew you to interrogating that idea so directly, and did you want the film to offer an answer as to what ‘home’ actually represents?

The theme of home was something my father wore on his sleeve, quite literally. He spoke often about the concept, and when I'd visit different places with him, whether that was Belgrade, London, or Bristol, he always found home in each of them. I don't know that he ever fully settled on which one felt most like home, because I think they all carried their own complications. That was always the ongoing thread in our conversations and in the film, because we're touching on the context of war and displacement, and what that does to people and to their children's understanding of home and culture. There's something of a particular loss about losing the parent you have a direct connection to a culture through, because then you're left to maintain it yourself, which is difficult.

Especially in London where the Serbian diaspora is much smaller and less concentrated in a specific area of the city, did that scarcity of the culture make reconnecting with that side of your identity even harder?

Yeah, 100%. I live in South London, and I know the bigger community is in West. My dad used to take me to the Serbian church in Ladbroke Grove, but my experience of London has always been on the wrong side of town for it. So yes, it's difficult. With family, it's only my uncle who speaks English, and I can't speak to my grandparents fluently, and that's something I'm still grappling with. But even just becoming friends with Slavko, who plays Vlad, has been a real connective tissue, he's Croatian which is somewhat different but it’s still a connection. And working with Aleksandra, getting to know her mum, being in Croatia with Slavko for a film festival, and then all of us in Sarajevo together, the film has genuinely helped me reconnect in ways I don't think would have happened otherwise.

Thea Gajic and Slavko Sobin behind the scenes of Surviving Earth (2026). Image credit Thea Gajic.

Moving on from the dual-language aspect, how did you approach the shift between the Serbian songs and the English tracks, and what was the thinking behind the final song used in the scene at the end of your father's life, given it cuts off abruptly rather than playing out? Was that intentional, and was the song selection generally driven by personal memory or a broader conversation about the culture?

Music is obviously a huge part of the film, and there are really two layers to the answer. The first is the live music the band plays, which is based on my dad's original music with his band. We took three or four of their songs and deconstructed and rebuilt them, my dad is credited as a writer on all of them, along with some of his original bandmates, since we kept some of the melodies. I wrote all the new lyrics, and my producer's mum translated them into Serbian. My dad's original lyrics were pretty silly, so for the film I rewrote them so they actually revealed more about the character's interiority. We recorded all of that during a week of prep in a house in Bath, with musicians who'd played with my dad and others who hadn't, since the band still exists in a different form.

The second layer is the soundtrack. I went through my dad's old USBs and hard drives and chose songs I remembered him playing, alongside others that just fit certain scenes. A lot of them we couldn't clear as his taste was so eclectic, ranging from Balkan folk to Caribbean music, that we often couldn't trace the original writers, so some had to be swapped for alternatives.

For the scene where he dies, we tried a lot of songs, not all Serbian or Balkan. Interestingly, the vinyl we used as a prop on set was actually playing a song from Fiddler on the Roof which my editor and I noticed while cutting the scene and tried using, but it was expensive and felt too on-the-nose. I think there’s actually great magic though in these limitations because you never know what will come of them. It’s from this that a music supervisor from Serbia, Goran, sent us some options, and we landed on the final Ljiljana Buttler song, I really loved the depth of her voice.

Your film also deals heavily with ideas about masculinity and Balkan masculinity in particular tends to root itself in being hyper-masculine and detached from emotion, how were you trying to comment on this kind of masculinity and what it costs the men forced to embody it?

I think Vlad as a character embodies quite a masculine juxtaposition, he's so hyper-masculine in many ways, but everyone can also see he's soft on the inside, caring, and painfully aware of how people might be judging him. That theme exists within Vlad as a character, and it was definitely intentional in both the writing and the direction, and in conversations I had with Slavko about how you straddle that within a culture that's so hyper-masculine, when a whole generation has had to mask their feelings and has been through real trauma.

The motifs of cigarettes, coffee, and rakija are also just the truth of how I saw Balkan masculinity, I wasn't thinking about them intentionally as symbols, they simply were what they were. But in terms of what Vlad embodied, we had loads of conversations about that. Because the film was funded by British institutions, there were times it came up in notes, questions like why he could be this volatile, how he could shift from one state to another. I'd have to explain that this is a representation of a character people perhaps haven't seen before, and this is what it looks like, and that’s why he's like that. It helped having Aleksandra there too, backing me up as she could say that this is the Balkan father experience!

Slavko Sobin as Vlad in Surviving Earth. Image credit Thea Gajic.

That tension is interesting against British and Western ideas of masculinity, which often get pushed into fairly black-and-white terms, one version positive, one negative. Does it surprise you that this more complex portrait wasn't immediately understood, and that there were questions about the inner tensions you were portraying, given it's a side of masculinity rarely shown at all?

It was interesting because on the page, the character was praised throughout and people would say things like this is one of the best-written characters they'd read. But it was in the edit, when they actually saw it performed, that concerns started coming up. At that point I'd have to say, you literally read this exact scene and told me what you loved about it and now you're seeing it and there are suddenly questions. It wasn't pushback exactly, more a lack of immediate understanding of that type of character in the flesh. I think it was also because he's the lead, and part of their concern was probably about how audiences fall in love with him, because the film needs that to work. So if he's allowed to be that volatile, the question then became how to portray all the wonderful factors about him? It was an interesting process, fighting for that.

One thing that's striking is that Vlad only really expresses his emotions in Serbian, a language and culture that often doesn't give men permission to have those emotions in the first place. Was that juxtaposition conscious, or was it more about creating as natural a picture of him as possible?

It was the latter, but I think the reason it comes out that way when the character talks to his Serbian family is partly cultural. Whereas his British friends are mostly beating around the bush, trying to therapise around events, his brother is straight to the point. Because of that directness, the trigger is more immediate, and he ends up expressing his frustration within the Serbian language, the same is true of Zlatan's character, who's direct about what he wants to say, whereas the British characters aren't like that. It's an interesting point of difference across cultures, and a lot of people who've watched it whose families aren't British, or Serbian or Balkan either, say they recognise so much of this behaviour in their own culture. There's a particular British reticence that a lot of other cultures just don't carry in the same way.

Director Thea Gajic behind the scenes of Surviving Earth (2026). Image credit Thea Gajic.

Your film also seems to speak to social class, particularly the economic pressures faced by those without the means to return to a home country, and the barriers of navigating different systems. Could you speak to that theme, and to whether you think filmmaking is becoming more accessible to people from non-traditional class backgrounds?

The bedroom tax element in the film reflects something that felt genuinely unfair to me, the way self-employed people or those on low incomes are chased for tax while much larger evasion goes unaddressed elsewhere. There's a real weight placed on working-class people's shoulders and an inability to free yourself from these systems in just having a total lack of cash flow, along with a benefits system that claims to want you to get back on your feet but punishes you the moment you earn a pound over the threshold.

I remember my best friend, who was my director's assistant, rereading the script during prep and being in tears afterwards. The moment that got her was the scene where the council calls Vlad, and he initially thinks it's someone else, because there's this extra weight on working-class people that makes it impossible to escape their circumstances. It felt important to show that after everything he's already survived, he still has to deal with something as mundane and grinding as council bureaucracy.

In terms of the industry itself, I think things are statistically getting worse for working-class people in the arts as well as for women, and for any minority really. There's no support system for surviving the gap between being noticed and actually working. Bodies in the UK will pick up your talent and say they want to shine a light on you, but a film can take upwards of two years to come out, and there's no answer for what you're meant to do in that time. I think there needs to be far more support, something like Ireland's basic income scheme for artists, which guarantees income so people can actually stay in the industry. I've spoken to people at major filmmaking events who've said they could barely afford the train fare there, so their financial reality is very different from the rooms they are in, especially if you have children, there’s very little wiggle-room.

I don't feel hopeful, but I don't feel jaded either, it's more a realistic view of the industry. I think there's real work for funding bodies, government, and policymakers to do if they want to keep diverse voices in the arts.

Finally, where can we find you next, do you have upcoming projects?

I've just done my first commercial, which was great, I think it's rolling out across cinemas, TV, and online, though I'm not sure exactly when. Beyond that, I'm figuring out my second film and having meetings about it at the moment, just trying to elevate to the next thing. I'm also conscious of not wanting to be pigeonholed into a UK social-realist space. It's funny because as soon as a film has a certain setting, people label it social realism, when really it's just drama with some themes running through it. So I'm looking to bring in some more genre elements next time and push things forward.

Surviving Earth debuted in UK cinemas on the 24 April 2026 and is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime.