Early Works

This is one of Želimir Žilnik’s most commercially successful films, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. “Early Works” recount a story of young people who took part in student demonstrations in June 1968 in Belgrade. Three young men and a girl, Yugoslava, defy the petit-bourgeois routine of everyday life. Wishing to “change the world”, inspired by the writings of young Karl Marx, they go to the country and to factories to “wake up people’s consciousness”, to encourage them in their fight for emancipation and life worth living. Being in field they face primitivism and squalor, but they show their own limits, weaknesses, incapacity and jealousy.

Želimir Žilnik

Želimir Žilnik is a pioneer of the Yugoslav Black Wave, offering a radical view of the socio-political events of the last fifty years in Europe. Žilnik’s heroes are marginalized members of society, migrants, the unemployed, and homeless people who tell their life stories in his films. Combining documentary with fiction, Žilnik creates dark, uncomfortable stories full of absurdity and humor. The director’s style—or rather, anti-style is pure and expressive, rejecting aestheticization to focus prameraly on the content itself.