22 April – 6 May, 2018

INTERVIEW WITH ŽELIMIR ŽILNIK, april 2018.

WHW

WHW: Since we are trying to touch upon the entirety of your work and engagement through the exhibition Shadow Citizens, let’s start from the beginning. How did you become interested in movies?

ŽŽ: At the time when my generation was growing up in the mid-1950s, watching films was an obsession, like gadgets for today’s digital generation. At that time, the cinema was the only window open into the world. There were ten times more cinemas than there are today, and the repertoire was very rich. In one cinema they showed cowboy sagas by Howard Hawks, John Ford, Fred Zinnemann; in another cinema they showed dramas, Italian beauties, palaces, and the Mediterranean—Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni. By the end of the ’50s, more realistic films emerged with which we identifed: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, and others.

Želimir Žilnik and the Black Wave

April 30 – May 21, 2017

Harvard Film Archive
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy Street
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138

Actively engaged in making politically incendiary films for over 50 years, Serbian filmmaker Želimir Žilnik (b. 1942) was a pioneering member of the radical Yugoslav “Black Wave” who, in 1971, read from the stage a manifesto entitled "This Festival Is a Cemetery" on the opening night of his stunning short, Black Film. Žilnik spoke about the worthlessness of abstract humanism, the exploitation of poverty and the “alleged bravery and socially conscious filmmaking which just represents the ruling fashion of bourgeois cinema.” No other film director in Serbia has remained committed to the idea of socially provocative and politically engaged filmmaking as persistently and as permanently as Žilnik.

AGAINST STATUS QUO: LATE WORKS BY ŽELIMIR ŽILNIK

May 16, 2017 - May 23, 2017

THE DRYDEN THEATRE​​​
George Eastman Museum
900 East Avenue
Rochester, NY 14607, USA

LOGBOOK_SERBISTAN

DATE: Tuesday, May 16, 2017
TIME: 7:30 p.m.
LOCATION: Dryden Theatre

Želimir Žilnik | Filmmaker in Person. Rather than seeing migrants as an anonymous horde that should either be pitied or feared, Žilnik provides ample space for individuals to introduce themselves and display their values, so that the viewers can identify with them and begin to understand their struggles.

THE OLD SCHOOL OF CAPITALISM