Discoveries from Yugoslavia World Cinema

Yugoslavian experimental short film.

In April 1954, the legendary Henri Langlois visited the Jugoslovenska kinoteka for the presentation of his exhibition “Fifty Years of French Cinema”.

Short experimental 8mm film. It has a certain dimension of strange experimentation with space, without a tendency to communicate something, but rather to experience an experiment.

Short Yugoslav film.

Short documentary by Krsto Škanata.

Today, there are fewer and fewer visitors in cinemas. Cinemas are shutting down. They disappear. Slowly, a space is leaving our lives… a space of illusions and some new dimensions, a dream that revealed unknown vistas.

It shows a stone structure embedded with human skulls located in Niš, Serbia.

Short silent 35mm documentary.

A walk around the ancient town of Trogir. The walker goes deeper and deeper into the stone labyrinth, and encounters fear, death and pain.

A short film.

Documentary about a farm in the north of Bačka.

Documentary movie about the Yugoslav air force and air defense.

An experimental short that plays with folklore to discuss socio-political issues within the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia.

During the day, Nejček tends cattle on a mountain and observes the movements of Nazi troops; at night, he reports to the partisans. The price of courage is his own life.

A documentary shot in Zagreb in 1968, showing the local orchestra playing for the Czechoslovak people who escaped their country after Soviet invasion.

Animated film produced by Zagreb Film

Since 1928, the School of Public Health has been organizing its own film service, which started producing films aimed to educate the village. This is an animated fragment from an educational-propaganda film about malaria, created in a photo-film laboratory. The film was shot by engineer Aleksandar Gerasimov, head of the laboratory, edited by dr. Dragutin Chloupek, and the cartoonist was academic painter Vilko Šeferov.

Pecko has a big nose and because of that problem he has a lot of unpleasant incidents.

As the small factory grows, the young worker Ismet Kozica has to visit the mountain villages to find new female workers.

A hardworking farmer wins a free holiday at a sea resort. For the first time in his life, Mikolaš can rest and relax in peace. A satire about agricultural policy and social differences.

A man is lonely. In his tragic alienation he cannot become close with another person.

An unexpected place for Maxi Cat tailor-made fishing.

Short documentary.

Summer of 1999. Novi Sad, Vojvodina, Serbia, Yugoslavia. After the NATO air strikes on the city, a group of young people are playing football. It seems like everything is in order.

Eminently a montage film, Monologue on Split is Martinac’s cinematic manifest.

Story about abandoned children who found shelter in different villages with different stepmothers.

This ethnographic and historical silent 16mm cinematic jewel was filmed in 1940 by Sifrid Miladinov – a professional photographer and amateur filmmaker from Kumanovo, a man with eclectic range of interests. In 16 short but precious minutes you will see what the village of Galichnik, the famous Galichnik wedding and our ancestors looked like 80 years ago – in color! – very unusual at that time. Maybe some of you will recognize your great-grandfather, great-great-grandmother, old family house, alley, tree, entrance door. Sifrid Miladinov’s film is a rare opportunity to look back in the past through authentic, original archive footage. We thank the descendants of this film enthusiast, the Miladinovi family from Zagreb, for depositing the film in our national film archive – the Cinematheque – several years ago.

A short silent footage of a film ball in the Yugoslavian capital.

Short silent film.

Ivan Ladislav Galeta's first experimental film displays a narrative structure and a philosophic/mystical idea – we begin nowhere and we end in nothing, at the starting point. From a hidden position, the camera follows a man in a black coat who approaches passers-by asking directions without taking his hands out of his pockets. The passers lift their hands and point their fingers at the direction he uses to continue his way.

Attempts of cattlemen from Vlašić mountain to maintain their cattle during the winter. In spring, when the first lambs appear, they seek new meadows.

A documentary art film.

Stop-motion recording of a pillow being folded and crumpled.

The people often go through the same path that is previously made although even by a drunkard. They do not pay attention to its length or its form.

It documents the installation of electrical lines high above a country valley.

Recordings that documented the founding of Kinoklub Zagreb and the enrollment of its first members.

Early recordings of a sport competition in Zagreb.

Ethnographic depiction of everyday village life and the social relations in the period before socialist modernisation.

The film's subject is the distribution of workers' housing. The right of residence, which Safer Korlatovic, salt-mining champion, received, is reason enough to make a poetic document from a moment of ordinary everyday life. Short, human joys are recorded, even in the moments when the main characters are unaware of what is happening around them.

The clacking of heels on the floor, to the rhythm of a measured walk, accompanies the movement of a camera that scrutinises a man in close up. Slowly, the camera turns around him, from his feet on the floor to the top of his head. The man doesn't move a muscle, with his arms lying straight by his side, as though he has become an object under a woman's eye, identifiable by the sound of her footsteps. The closeness of the camera fragments and fetishises the body. There are no wide shots at any point that might enable the man to be identified. The fragments glimpsed by the camera do not provide any identifying markers, rendering the overall view disproportionate. Like a "monument", the figure is presented to the audience.

The Ohrid icon 'The Annunciation' is electronically transformed into a video image. Images of biblical themes change into modernistic ones - into a cross. There is a line at the beginning of each image, and the spectator's view is outside the line, allowing him to follow the transformation of the sign, image, world.

Produced at International Video Colony Ohrid, Macedonia 1989. Screened in retrospective at Alternative Film/Video Belgrade Festival 2014.