Biography
Želimir Žilnik is an award-winning filmmaker. Focussing on contemporary issues, his films feature social, political and economic assessments of everyday life.
The student demonstrations of 1968 and the turmoil that followed the occupation of Czechoslovakia are at the centre of Žilnik’s first feature film, Early Works (1969) which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and four prizes in Pula that same year.
Žilnik spent the mid-1970s in Germany, where he independently produced and made seven documentaries and one feature film, Paradise (1976). These films were amongst the first ever to touch on the foreign workforce in Germany, and they continue to be shown at various retrospectives and symposiums.
Following his return to Yugoslavia at the end of the 1970s, he directed a series of television films and docudramas for TV Belgrade and TV Novi Sad.
The breakdown of the system of values in post-transitional Central and Eastern European countries and the problems concerning refugees and migration in the new circumstances of an extended Europe became the focus of Žilnik's most recent films: The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018); Old School of Capitalism (2009); Kenedi is Getting Married (2007); Soap in Danube Opera (2006); Europe Next Door (2005); Kenedi Goes Back Home (2003); and Fortress Europe (2000).
Žilnik has been the subject of major career retrospectives at Cinemateca Argentina (2018); Mar del Plata International Film Festival (2017); Anthology Film Archive, New York & Harvard Film Archive (2017); Ankara International Film Festival (2016); DocLisboa (2015); and Arsenal, Berlin (2015), among others.
He was born in 1942 in Niš and lives and works in Novi Sad.
SAF participation:
Sharjah Biennial 10
