Fifteen years after the breakout success of Tilva Roš, a film that captured the restless spirit of youth in post-industrial Serbia, Bor-born film director Nikola Ležaić returns with his long-awaited sophomore feature, titled How Come It’s All Green Out Here?. 

The film, which had its world premiere in the Proxima Competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (4-12 July), is a road movie of sorts — quiet, meditative and deeply autobiographical — unfolding across a weekend journey to Dalmatia. The story follows a thirty-something commercial director named after Ležaić himself (played by Filip Đurić), who accompanies his father (Izudin Bajrović) and extended family to rebury his late grandmother’s remains in her home village. Ostensibly, not much happens, but the emotional terrain traversed along the way is profound.

More than a simple narrative of familial duty, Ležaić’s film becomes a meditation on fatherhood and identity. Its strength lies in the tension between what is said and what is left unsaid. Through sparse dialogue, well-dosed touches of irony, nuanced performances and a careful attention to off-screen space, the director creates a world where time dilates and memory folds in on itself. 

How Come It’s All Green Out Here? is a work that gently excavates personal and collective trauma in a landscape marked by past upheavals. With its poetic restraint and unexpected humour, the film quietly disarms the viewer while prompting larger questions about reconciliation, belonging and life.

In this candid conversation, Ležaić discusses the film’s origins, its stylistic strategies and the necessity of emotional truth to storytelling. He also reflects on his evolving relationship with cinema and the way personal loss shaped the work in ways he hadn’t fully anticipated.

K2.0: Just to open up your film a little bit to our readers — how did the idea for making How Come It’s All Green Out Here? come about? Since it’s such a personal film, how is your own life woven through it?

Ležaić: Well, more or less, the film is a kind of transcript of a real situation in my life. It all goes back to 10 years ago, when my family decided to move my late grandmother’s remains back to her home village in Croatia. She was a refugee in the mid-1990s, when the war was ending, and died in the early 2000s in Serbia. At the time, bringing her back was too fresh, too complicated — the paperwork alone discouraged us.

Years later, a guy who had managed to repatriate his own mother’s remains helped us with the whole process. When my parents told me they wanted to do this, I immediately felt the story had a film structure — like a road movie with parents going back to Croatia after 25 years to “recover” the bones of grandma. Everything about it screamed cinema, but I initially didn’t want to make a film about it. It felt like a goodbye movie with my father, who was already in his seventies and not the healthiest. I was also working on another father-son story at the time, which eventually collapsed after years of failed financing.

Then, in 2020, when COVID hit, my dad got infected while in the hospital. Two weeks later, he died. On the day he passed, I tested positive for COVID myself. I couldn’t go to his funeral. He, like my grandmother after the exhumation, was buried in a lead coffin. I was home, miserable, and just started connecting the dots. I had an “extra” funeral, you know? I needed some relief, so I started writing everything I remembered from that trip. Ten days later, I had the first draft of the script. Writing was the only way to process it.

So, writing really began in December 2020?

Exactly. In 2021, I applied for funding to the Serbian Film Center. I wanted to shoot the film that same year — punk-rock style: write it down and shoot it. I did get funding, but it wasn’t enough, so I had to start looking for co-producers again. That, of course, took years, which is why it’s only finished now, in 2025. It’s funny — you try to rush something, and it still ends up taking five years.

Was it a solo process, or did other voices influence the writing?

It was mainly a solo process. I gave early drafts to some friends and they told me what felt too long, too short, things like that. But I had one strict rule: everything in the script had to have really happened. I can’t stand films that are “based on real events” as a marketing trick to make things seem more important than they are. To me, everything in art stems from real emotion, whether it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or a documentary.

So all the dialogue and events in the script are real or at least happened to me at some point. Maybe not at the same time, maybe rearranged, but still real. That became part of the concept too — how memory distorts reality, how recollection itself can be a creative act. The line between fact and fiction blurs, but the emotional core remains authentic. That was non-negotiable.

The film touches on fatherhood in subtle but powerful ways. What did you want to say about becoming a father and fatherhood at large?

That’s a complicated one. When we made that trip, I was becoming a father myself. In my mid-30s, still feeling like I was in my early 20s — aren’t we all? I had grey hair and bad eyesight, but mentally, I still felt like a student. My father was a calm, decent man. Kind of like Gandhi — he never cared about material things. I thought about how I wanted to pass that on to my daughter.

But at the same time, I was making commercials, hardcore consumerist stuff. It’s like being a drug dealer and not wanting your kid to become a junkie. So, yeah, I had a lot of mixed feelings. I don’t know what I wanted to say about fatherhood, to be honest. Maybe just that we all try our best with what we have, some people are more self-absorbed, but those who care, we try. I think that’s what the film says too: it’s okay not to have it all figured out.

Let’s talk about form. How did your cinematography, editing and sound design choices help you express these ideas — especially memory?

My director of photography Aleksandar Pavlović, and I have worked together for 15 years, mostly on commercials. We really know each other. We wanted to avoid the lush, postcard-like look you often get in films set in the Mediterranean. Instead, we placed the main character at the centre of the frame and built a world around him. What enters and leaves the frame — through light, sound, choreography — creates this sense of a living world.

We often used just one or two shots per scene. Even car scenes were mostly shot in long takes. That gave the actors room to move freely and inhabit the space. Everything was carefully rigged and lit 360 degrees, so it may look simple, but it was incredibly complicated technically.

In editing, the original script had the trip begin halfway through the film. I wanted viewers to suffer a little with the character in his boring city life. But my editor, Jan Klemsche, suggested cutting straight into the trip, just after 15 minutes, letting the audience learn things on the way. It worked much better. You don’t know everything at the start, but you gather meaning as you go — like life. That trust in the audience to catch up was essential.

Sound was also crucial. I love scenes where people talk over each other, where the important stuff isn’t always centre stage. It creates this messy, real-life energy. Sometimes the dialogue seems completely irrelevant, but by the end of the conversation, you understand why it was there. That’s the rhythm I was chasing. The goal was to recreate the texture of actual conversation — not movie conversation.

The project was a co-production between Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria. How did that collaboration come about? Did it affect the film’s tone and, potentially, its reception?

Well, Siniša Juričić from Nukleus Film [a film production company] in Croatia is one of the co-producers. I met him 10 years ago while I was still working on this other project I told you about. He was sitting in a jury of some pitching event and we won that contest. That night, over drinks, I told him about this weird real-life story I had, and he said, “If you ever make that a movie, call me.” So when I got the Serbian funding in 2021, I did. He was in from the start — helped with actors, logistics, everything. We had cast members from four out of six ex-Yugoslav countries.

Then he introduced us to PREMIERstudio [production company] producer Nikolay Mutafchiev from Bulgaria, and he came on board with the camera and sound crews. It was a truly regional effort, and it helped shape the film without altering its tone. Everyone understood that the story came from a personal place, and they respected that. And maybe, in a quiet way, the fact that this cross-border production even happened is its own kind of statement.

One last question — how did you come up with the title How Come It’s All Green Out Here?

The working title was Mama. All our funding applications, said Mama. It was a counterpoint to the fatherhood theme, because really, all the characters who drive the plot are mothers — my wife, my father’s mother, my aunts, my own mother. They’re the force behind the scenes in a very patriarchal setting.

But eventually we realised there are at least two films called Mama every year. On IMDb, it would end up as Mama (2025/II) or something ridiculous. So I looked for something weirder and more meaningful. I remembered this line from my first film, Tilva Roš, spoken by a character named Filip towards the end: “How come it’s all green out here, even though all around is bare rock?” [This] was actually the full sentence I wanted as the title — but we ended up shortening it.

The point is, around these abandoned houses in Dalmatia, everything is lush and green. It’s because people once lived there — they raised animals, fertilised the soil, left their energy behind. So even though they’re gone, life remains. That’s the idea. The people may not be there anymore, but something of them still is. 

This article has been edited for length and clarity. The conversation was conducted in English.

Feature image: courtesy of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival/KVIFF

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