Slovenian filmmaker Kukla, whose debut feature “Fantasy” premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and played this week at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, is currently working on her sophomore feature. While the project has been mentioned briefly before, Variety has obtained exclusive additional details, including the working title, casting, and Kukla’s sources of inspiration.
Her next project, tentatively titled **“Good Girl,”** is a modern take on the Ancient Greek comedy *Lysistrata* by Aristophanes. In the original play, an Athenian woman persuades women from warring city-states to withhold sex from men until they cease fighting in the war. Kukla explained to Variety in the Greek coastal city of Thessaloniki, with Mount Olympus visible across the sea, that her updated version of *Lysistrata* is set against the backdrop of a threatened third world war.
In this contemporary take, a TikToker “randomly speaks her thoughts out loud that we should stop having sex with men and stop giving birth to their kids if they want to kill them, and she starts a huge movement all over the world,” Kukla says. The film draws partial inspiration from the Korean 4B Movement—a radical feminist movement that advocated rejecting sex, childbirth, dating, and marriage. Originally a response to male violence against women, it evolved into a broader protest against male oppression and later spread to the U.S. following President Trump’s victory last year.
The story of *Good Girl* will unfold across various territories, including the Balkans and France. “I think that female solidarity will save the world, and I really want to show the strength of women everywhere,” Kukla adds.
The lead actresses from *Fantasy*—Sarah Al Saleh, Mina Milovanović, and Mia Skrbinac—will also appear in this second feature. While Skrbinac is a professional actress, both Al Saleh and Milovanović are non-professionals. All three previously appeared in Kukla’s 2020 short film *Sisters*, which featured the same characters and storyline as *Fantasy* and won the Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.
“*Good Girl* is like an homage to them, because we have been on a long journey together, and we have grown up together as people and as filmmakers as well,” Kukla remarks.
Like *Good Girl*, *Fantasy* also stems from Kukla’s interest in patriarchy, gender roles, and identity. The film centers on three tomboys—Mihrije, Sina, and Jasna—best friends in Slovenia who resist conforming to their communities’ conservative norms and traditions such as arranged marriages. Their lives are upended when they meet Fantasy, a transgender woman, leading them on a journey of self-discovery as they explore alternative perspectives on gender roles and sexuality.
Alina Juhart, who plays Fantasy, is well-known in the Balkans due to her participation in a TV talent show. Kukla comments, “It’s very interesting how, on the one hand, it’s such a conservative place, but on the other, they’re very welcoming. That’s where I see the power of pop culture. That’s why the film has a lot of pop culture moments, because I think it’s good to make it approachable for the viewer.”
Regarding her three young lead actresses, Kukla says, “I really wanted them to be co-creators of the film. In a sense, they were co-editing the script with me,” so the story could be seen through their eyes. “I really believe I found people who have the essence of the characters in themselves. So, it’s not that they were playing themselves, but some part of themselves. That’s why it was a very transformative process for all of us. They were speaking their words, from their perspective. It was really important to me that this film came from within, that we are represented equally.”
The idea for *Fantasy* originated about 10 years ago when Kukla became intrigued by the phenomenon of “sworn virgins” — women in the Balkans who took a vow of chastity, lived and dressed as men, and were considered to belong to a third gender. She wanted to transpose this rejection of femininity and traditional gender roles into a contemporary setting still dominated by patriarchy.
“In this social setting, they would be called tomboys, who fight like boys and are fiercely independent,” Kukla explains. She continues, “Then there was a spark of an idea: What would happen if a sworn virgin met a transgender woman in the Balkans? That meeting was a spark that expanded the whole view on femininity in the Balkans. And through that, I came to core questions like, ‘Am I able to see myself uncontaminated by the male gaze? Or, where is the female eye? Where’s the female voice? And, from there, it goes in so many directions.”
Kukla now lives in Belgrade, Serbia, but grew up in Slovenia. Her parents are from North Macedonia. Born Katarina Bogdanovic, she goes by Kukla—which means “doll” in Macedonian—a childhood nickname that stuck.
“In the late 90s and early 2000s, [Slovenia] was a very xenophobic place,” Kukla recalls. “My national identity was drowned in shame. I speak perfect Slovenian, but when they heard my mother speaking, there was a lot of bullying. So, we just weren’t accepted as a community.”
She adds, “Then the integration process successfully, let’s say, manifested. And now it has become some sort of a subculture. So it’s a very interesting cultural phenomenon. I’m really interested in those fluidities of identity. So I’m reflecting also on that in the film, because every diaspora is always more conservative than the original country. And also, there’s a mix of a lot of different cultures.”
In *Fantasy*, the character of Fantasy acts as a catalyst, prompting a reevaluation of identity, including queer identity in the Balkans.
“Fantasy is not afraid of her vulnerability, but also not afraid of her power,” Kukla says. “I wanted to include this Balkan queerness in my film, which is not dependent on Western queerness. I think we have our own version of it.”
“I don’t see her as a passive character at all. I think she’s very active, but she shows the other three girls that with her stance on her identity and with her honesty and courage, there are so many versions of femininity and that you can live your own truth. And that is something that I was very eager to show in the film because the Balkans is a very contradictory place. It’s a very transphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic place, yet her DMs are full of straight men with families. That was the contradiction that I was quite mad at because there’s a lot of sexual interest in trans women, but no interest in them as normal humans, as equals in society.”
*Fantasy* is produced by Lija Pogačnik, Barbara Daljavec, and Vlado Bulajić for Slovenia’s December. The film also screened in competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival and is being sold internationally by Totem Films.
The Hollywood Reporter was the first to report on Kukla’s second feature.
https://variety.com/2025/film/global/kukla-good-girl-fantasy-1236573286/
