Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Murina has garnered her a DGA nomination for first-time feature — an honor she also won at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. That’s in large part because of her willingness to face her greatest fears in the name of her art. “I’m terrified of the water,” she says. “I needed to make a movie underwater, because I really wanted to tap into the fear. It’s important to include your fears in your work.”

A coming-of-age story, Murina follows Julija, a teenager living on a remote island in Croatia with her domineering father and subservient mother. When her dad’s wealthy friend Javier (Cliff Curtis) comes to stay with the family, tensions rise as he offers Julija a possible exit out of her abusive household.

Kusijanović grew up spending summers on a similar isle, passing her days exploring its rocky beaches. She made a similarly aquatic-focused short film, Into the Blue, in 2017, in which she also cast Murina‘s star, the statuesque Gracija Filipović. As a child, Filipović had appeared as an extra in a music video directed by Kusijanović, and the filmmaker was struck by her presence. “It’s not only her posture that was monumental. It’s also the construction of her face. I was very seduced by it,” she says. “She had so much presence in front of the camera. She’s completely different once the camera turns on, [and] she has so much discipline because she was a professional [swimmer].”

Kusijanović wrote Murina (with Frank Graziano) swiftly in order to cast Filipović (now 20, but she was 16 during filming) while she was still young enough to play Julija. “It’s incredibly challenging to write a script, especially when you’re writing it with a ticking clock — knowing that your main actress is changing every minute,” she explains. “My main source of inspiration was always, I’m writing this for 16-year-old me. Any woman can relate to that time, no matter what age they are. It is about tapping into [the] resilience you have before you are inevitably broken by life.”

Murina has many sequences — underwater, in hidden caves, on unforgiving soil — that were difficult to capture. Kusijanović tapped cinematographer Hélène Louvart (The Lost Daughter, Never Rarely Sometimes Always) to lens her story. “Her specialty is simplifying seemingly very complicated things,” says Kusijanović. “Only through simplicity can you access the real complexity. I [was] privileged to work with her because it was so important that this sensitive and delicate age that Gracija was in [was] captured by the very understanding eye of another woman.”

On a technical level, filming involved underwater shots in darkness and on boats amid Adriatic gusts as Julija navigates a narrow oceanic tunnel to escape a submerged cave. All the underwater shoots were done on the island Kusijanović grew up visiting with her grandmother, who played amateur location scout. “We shot only underwater scenes on that island, because I know the island so well,” she explains.

“We were thinking: ‘OK, there are a bunch of caves on the island, we’re going to go in and shoot it.’ But my grandmother was like, ‘No, shoot at this crevice that is so deep, but it’s open on top so it’s not going to be claustrophobic. Shoot it during the night. It’s going to feel like a cave.’ It was a great setup for the crew and it made sense. My grandmother was right.”

This story first appeared in the Feb. 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.