It’s her feature debut. Premiered at SXSW 2025 in the Narrative Spotlight slot, picked up real theatrical traction across 2026, and got proper write-ups from Sight and Sound and UK Film Review through March and April this year. IMDb is at 7.9 right now. For a £2.2 million indie debut from a first-time director, that’s not nothing.
Quick reference:
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Writer / Director | Thea Gajić (feature debut) |
| Lead | Slavko Sobin as Vlad |
| Daughter | Olive Gray as Maria |
| Bandmate / best friend | Stuart Martin as Misko |
| Genre | Drama |
| Runtime | 1h 36min |
| Languages | English, Serbian |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Setting | Bristol, 1995 onwards |
| Production | My Accomplice & Sona Films |
| Budget | £2.2 million (estimated) |
| World premiere | SXSW 2025, Narrative Spotlight |
| IMDb rating | 7.9 / 10 |
What the Film is Actually About
Vlad got out of Yugoslavia years back. Didn’t want to be pulled into the war. Ended up in Bristol. By the time we meet him properly, he’s a recovering heroin addict working as a drug counsellor, plays harmonica in a Balkan band on the side, and is somewhere mid-effort at being a real father to his grown daughter Maria.
Then life starts pressing in on him from a few directions at once:
- Family back home in Serbia keep asking him for money he doesn’t really have
- The band is starting to take off, which sounds like a good problem until you remember what success can do to a recovering addict
- The old version of him never feels as far away as he wants it to be
The cast Gajić built around Sobin is small and very deliberate:
- Slavko Sobin as Vlad – Croatian actor doing pretty much all of the emotional lifting.
- Olive Gray as Maria – the daughter who’s quietly figured out she’s the more responsible one of the two.
- Stuart Martin as Misko – bandmate and best friend, based on a real person the film honours in its end credits.
- Ann Ogbomo, Brian Bogdanovic, Arthur McBain – round out the Bristol community Vlad has built around himself.
How Critics Have Been Reading It
| Where | What they took from it |
|---|---|
| UK Film Review | A bold, unflinching debut. Patient where Trainspotting was frantic, but pulling from the same well |
| Sight and Sound (BFI) | Sensitive work. Sobin called a beguiling emotional anchor for the whole thing |
| Cineuropa | A regular-people story wearing immigrant-story clothes, with addiction and mental health running underneath |
| Letterboxd audiences | Final stretch hits hard. Two lead performances carry the film. Cinematography well beyond the budget |
| ScreenAnarchy (SXSW) | Joyful, loving, complex. Not really about addiction even when it is |
Why it Lands the Way it Does
Addiction films usually follow a shape you can draw from memory. Slip, recover, slip again, ending TBD. Surviving Earth knows that shape exists and just refuses to be ruled by it.
Sobin carries the whole thing. He plays Vlad loose, charming, a bit cracked at the edges. Not the rehearsed sad-man performance these roles usually slide into. The scenes with him and Maria don’t reach for big drama either. They just put two people in a room and trust that the history between them does the work, which it does.
The dedication at the end matters here. Real Vladimir Gajić. Real Misko. Knowing that going in doesn’t change anything technical about what’s on screen. It changes everything else.
Yes, the addiction story isn’t breaking new ground. Some reviewers have already said as much. But this film was never trying to break new ground. It wanted to put one specific man in one specific room and let you sit there with him, and on that count it absolutely delivers.
