If tears aren’t rolling down your cheeks by the second half of When Day Breaks, then you aren’t fully human. This sad but passionate film tells the story of a mild-mannered and retiring (pun intended) music professor who must come to terms with the fact that his life as he knows it is a lie. Raised as a Christian in Serbia, he finds out he is a Jew who was given away by his parents at age two just before they were rounded up and sent to the Judenlager Semlin Concentration Camp in Belgrade.

The level of acting skill displayed in the film is amazing. The portrayal of the nuanced Jewish character Mischa Brankov Weiss by Mustafa Nadarevic is so spot on that I still can’t believe that Mustafa isn’t secretly Jewish. Many of the other actors in their 50’s to 80’s are also remarkable. Rade Kojadinovic as the farmer Kosta Brankov is so good you can almost smell the dried mud on his fingertips.

Mischa, initially incredulous of his new identity and later passionately embracing it, decides to complete the musical script his father buried at the Camp before he died. But what is important to Mischa is less so to the modern Serbians who are more interested in earning a living than remembering a bitter and heinous past. As much a generational conflict as a battle, the young are looking to the future, while the older generation cannot forget its past. Mischa finds comfort with his gypsy friends whose past and present seem equally miserable.

Will Mischa get his piece of music performed and if so by whom? Will it be by the choir he formally led, his son’s orchestra or by someone else? In the end, we are shown a generation that will not go quietly into the night.