Interview: Why Do Children Learn to Keep Silent So Early?
Miroslav Terzić’s film Three Weeks After and its leading actress, Tihana Lazović Trifunović, raise a painful question.
Interview by: Miljana Momirović
Originally published in: Marie Claire Serbia
Violence among children rarely begins where adults finally notice it. It is usually preceded by subtle teasing, exclusion, silences, and glances that turn away. And between the first warning sign and the dramatic outcome, enough time can pass for a child’s fear to become an invisible part of everyday life for everyone around them.
It is precisely this space that Miroslav Terzić’s film Three Weeks After explores. The film had its world premiere in competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and was subsequently screened in Pula and Sarajevo.
One of the film’s key adult figures, Professor Viktorija, is played by Tihana Lazović Trifunović. In this role, the actress had to navigate the space between professional responsibility, personal boundaries, and all those nuances that sometimes prevent people from reacting—even when they should.
For this reason, her conversation is not merely about a film and a role. It is a conversation about how well we truly know the world in which children grow up, why the need to belong is so powerful that it leads us to accept silence, and what happens when we begin to notice violence only once it can no longer be dismissed as “minor.”
Three Weeks After deals with peer bullying, but even more so with what remains afterwards: silence and guilt. What was most disturbing for you about this story?
What frightened me from the very beginning was how perfectly that system of abuse functions, and how it operates almost everywhere in the same way—as if there were a script in which everyone plays their part: the victim, the bully and the bystander. The circumstances are different each time, as are the people, but the pattern remains the same. Those who bully know how far they can go; the bystanders know what they risk if they intervene; and adults either do not see, are not ready to see, or have no support from the system to change things.
What haunted me throughout the making of the film, and during the shoot itself, was the thought of how long that child had lived in fear while an entirely normal life unfolded around him. I think it is important that this film should not speak only of a tragedy, but take us back to everything that preceded it—and to the question of how it was possible to live for so long alongside someone else’s fear.
It seems to me that one of the most difficult aspects of bullying is the fact that children learn very early on to remain silent in order to stay part of the group. How much stronger is the need to belong than our need to do what we know is right?
One of the deepest human needs is precisely the need to belong. We adults often pretend that we have outgrown it, too: we remain silent in order to stay part of the group, we conform, we fail to react when we should, and we play different roles out of the natural human fear of rejection. We have simply learned to do it in a more sophisticated way. Although often, not all that much more sophisticated.
That is why it is difficult to expect children to possess a kind of moral courage that even we adults lack. For a child, the possibility of being rejected by society can feel like the end of the world. A classroom is a child’s entire world; they will return to that same class tomorrow and the day after. It is only natural that they develop their own mechanisms for survival.
This does not mean that the silence of the bystanders should be justified. But we need to understand where violence comes from, and what kinds of relationships we create in schools.
The adults are present in the film, but they are unable to stop what is happening among the children. How much do we really see the children around us, and how much do we merely assume we know about what they are going through?
Well, one of the film’s most uncomfortable questions certainly concerns the role of adults—and there is no simple answer. Relationships among young people have their own dynamics and a life to which we adults often have no access. And sometimes young people simply do not have the words to explain what they are experiencing.
The point is not to blame adults for not knowing everything, but to open a healthy dialogue between young people, parents and teachers before a tragedy occurs. But this also raises the question of the system. Does the school listen to a child who is being subjected to violence? What happens when they speak up? Who does a teacher turn to when they notice a problem? The education system should be able to answer these questions, and I’m not sure that it can.
Even when individuals are ready to “do the right thing,” if they are not supported by an adequate system, nothing fundamentally changes.
We often begin talking about violence only when it has a tragic outcome. Why is it so difficult for us to take “small” forms of violence seriously—exclusion, teasing, humiliation, group silence—until they become something much bigger?
Unfortunately, we measure the seriousness of violence according to how dramatic the event is, without connecting it to everything that came before. We dismiss every “small” act of teasing, exclusion or humiliation as puberty, hormones, or passing dynamics among young people. Only when the worst happens do we ask ourselves how we failed to see the pattern. And the pattern is almost always the same, everywhere.
Your character, Viktorija, is one of the adults caught in a very complex situation, between professional responsibility and her relationship with the students. How did you develop the character so that she would not simply be “the teacher who must react,” but a woman with her own limitations, fears and dilemmas?
From the very first reading of the screenplay, I asked myself how to portray Viktorija without reducing her to a black-and-white portrait of an adult who failed to respond to violence. I did not want to condemn her from the outset, because then I would have had nothing to play. I tried to understand who she was beyond her role as class coordinator: her history, the circumstances of her life, and the traumas and defence mechanisms that had led her to turn away in the face of violence. Not in order to justify her, but to bring her to life.
She and the mathematics teacher are the only adults in the film and, in a sense, represent the system itself. But it was important to me that behind that idea there should be real, flesh-and-blood people.
The film is inspired by real events, but it is not based on one specific case. During the process, was it important for you not to offer the audience a simple answer to the question of who is to blame, but to show how responsibility is actually shared among individuals, the group and the system?
The film is not there to provide answers, but to ask questions—and I think we succeeded. It would be easier if, in response to the question of who is to blame, we had a single name, surname and address. We would have a culprit, explain what happened, and avoid having to look at everything that preceded the event.
In a sense, the film places the audience in the role of the bystander, which is an uncomfortable and frightening experience. But I think that precisely this feeling of discomfort can open up conversations that go beyond asking who is to blame, and force us to reconsider our own responsibility: what we look at, what we notice and what we remain silent about before we react. We have normalised violence to such an extent that we accept it as something ordinary. I would like the film to shake us out of that habit.
After everything you have reflected on through this role and this film, is there anything you now see differently when you observe the dynamics among young people—something you might not previously have recognised as a potentially serious problem?
It seems to me that one of the problems is how easily we adults draw conclusions about young people without actually seeing or listening to them. I too, from a position of unconscious arrogance, assumed that younger generations were lost, just as my parents’ generation had thought the same about ours. This actually prevents us from noticing what is truly happening among them: what troubles them, whom they love and what they aspire to.
Then the students’ protests in Serbia took place and completely proved me wrong. I was captivated by their passion, intelligence, eloquence, determination and sense of justice. When I think that young people like this are growing up all around us, I remain optimistic about the future—and that gives me hope.
Three Weeks After is a co-production of This and That Productions, Nightswim, Paul Thiltges Distributions, Invictus and Kinorama, with the contribution of the Ministry of Culture and the support of Cineworld Luxembourg, the Bulgarian National Film Center, the Film Center Serbia, the Croatian Audiovisual Centre and Creative Europe.
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