Events

Želimir Žilnik Masterclass: Reality and Miracle in Foundation of a Documentary Film

Time and place  
27.02. / Friday, 17:00 - 18:30 Theatre Zagreb Film  
Želimir Žilnik is a renowned director, noted especially for his socially engaged films and documentaries in former Yugoslavia and his unique visual style that earned him critical accolades ('The Unemployed', 'Early Works'), but also censorship in the 1970s for his unflinching criticism of the government apparatus.

Low-budget filmmaking and challenging political themes mark Žilnik’s prolific career that includes over 50 feature and documentary films and shorts. He is also known as an initiator of the “docudrama” genre. Throughout his career, he observes paradoxical and irrational sides of both human destinies and state structures: from early socialism and its liquidation, orchestration and execution of Yugoslav wars, followed by disintegration of the state, establishment of a so-called “democracy” and its defeat, to the most recent trends of a “pledge of allegiance” to the EU. In this masterclass, Žilnik will present his filmmaking methodology applied in almost all of his works that deal with social engagement, humour, grotesque, comedy and explicit political criticism.

“To demonstrate the vigour of film protagonists and my stylistic approach to mark the epoch when those films were created, in this masterclass I will present excerpts from my films One Woman – One Century, The Old School of Capitalism, Europe Next Door, Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time and Uprising in Jazak.” – Želimir Žilnik