The addiction-recovery mantra of taking it one day at a time is at the heart of this honest-feeling drama, a grownup debut from first-time London film-maker Thea Gajić. She has spoken in interviews about her father being the inspiration for this painfully believable character study, which gives us an alternative to movies portraying addiction as an issue to be tackled or put under a microscope.
Surviving Earth features a raw and powerful performance by Croatian actor Slavko Sobin. He plays Vlad, a handsome and charismatic recovering heroin addict living in Bristol, having arrived in the UK in the 1990s, fleeing the Yugoslav civil war. After years of using heroin, he’s now clean, working as drug counsellor and spending his evenings playing harmonica in a Balkan band with a couple of mates from work. Vlad has a grownup daughter called Maria (Olive Gray), who is an artist in London; she has complicated feelings about her dad – wary of being let down again by him again but craving his attention.
