When Day Breaks

Goran Paskaljević : 2012
Kad svane dan

Miša Brankov is a retired music professor. One morning he receives a letter requesting him to contact the Jewish Museum in Belgrade. At the museum, he learns that during an excavation on the sewers at the city's old fairgrounds an iron box was found. The location had previously been the site of an infamous concentration camp where some 48,000 Serbian Jews and Gypsies had perished during the Second World War. The contents of the box, that will change his life, include personal documents pertaining to the professor's identity and an unfinished musical score called "When Day Breaks". The box was buried by a concentration camp inmate, the Jewish musician Isaac Weiss, in the year 1941. Eventually, the professor discovers that when he was an infant, his real parents, the Weisses, entrusted him to their friends, the Brankovs, just before they were taken into the camp. The initial shock of the professor's discovery soon gives way to a determination to fulfil the shattered dreams that he has inherited. It is something that infuses him with new purpose and provides him with a second lease on life.