Thea Gajić’s debut feature is rooted in a searingly personal story: the Bristol-set BFI- and Film4-backed drama Surviving Earth was developed through the 2019 round of iFeatures and is based on her father’s life.

A talented harmonica player, he fled from Serbia to the UK during the 1990s Yugoslavia conflict, overcoming heroin addiction and starting his own Balkan band. 

“Trying to understand my feelings, I started to explore them through writing,” recalls Gajić. She met producer Aleksandra Bilić, also from former Yugoslavia, at a screening of one of Gajić’s short films. “We spoke at length about how there is a generation of people from that part of the world that have similar journeys and stories, and how unexplored it is in western cinema,” she recalls.

Bilić produces Surviving Earth alongside Sophie Reynolds, with 2023 Star of Tomorrow Danielle Goff an associate producer. The film is in post.

Gajić began her creative journey by acting in school plays, and filming content on her iPhone and “a shitty Canon” camera around her south London home. She attended local youth creative agency Latimer’s networking sessions, forging two key connections — with Katie Swinden, a producer on Peaky Blinders, through whom Gajić landed an internship on the show, and cinematographer Olan Collardy, a 2021 Star of Tomorrow who remains her collaborator.

Her first short Run won a new talent award at BFI Future Film Festival in 2017, and was the calling card for a Sundance Ignite fellowship. A handful of shorts followed before Eva Yates, BBC Film’s then-commissioning executive, now director, took note and encouraged her to apply to iFeatures.

Along the way, Gajić reached the final round of auditions for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and acted in TV series Enterprice and Sliced. Rapper Stormzy, an “old friend”, also called on her to make a film of his set at London’s Wireless music festival in 2018, which she turned around with a couple of days’ notice.

Gajić is grateful she cut her teeth on a whirlwind of DIY projects before landing Surviving Earth. “I understood so many people’s jobs,” she says. “The scrappy stuff helped me.”

Contact: Ian Benson, Nicola Biltoo

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