Hommage: Želimir Žilnik

Žilnik defines the object of his research already at the start of his career. It lies in the relation between ideology and society. The protagonists of his films are always those from the brink (children of the street, unemployed, workers, homeless, migrant workers, crossdressers, illegal immigrants, the Roma etc.), whose status, Žilnik says, most accurately mirrors the social system. He places the film at the creative crossroads of critical theory, socio-political engagement, and practice of daily life. His cinematic endeavours echo cinéma vérité (truth cinema), while his unique approach is based on the critical revision of personal experience. According to Chris Marker, cinéma vérité is “always ‘ciné-MA verité’ [cinema, MY truth] [film-MOJA-resnica]because the cinematic object is never just reality but, as Godard claimed, also a depiction of reality. Aggressive striving for credibility can never circumvent the fact that a film is always a construct, a performance, a selection of certain external characteristics pertaining to the real, and a choice of their arrangement into images and sounds.”
After Yugoslavia had pejoratively labelled Žilnik’s films ‘black’ or marked them as ideologically unsuitable, he immigrated to Munich, Germany, where his films of the seventies still turned to marginalised subjects – migrant workers, ‘internal refugees’ (coined by Pavle Levi) who face a series of limitations in a foreign country.
Žilnik builds authentic histories, which are not the main subject of the film. He shapes them with various expressive means and genres. His work develops itself by discovering its own structure, by shaping directly in front of the viewer, and by the engaged attitude towards the film subject, in which Žilnik uniquely merges individual fates with their environments. He builds this relationship with a ‘mosaic’ plural structure that shows different situations and relations – attributing these to seemingly(!) unimportant details. Žilnik’s approach often includes elements of provocation, discussion, and original humour that create distance and simultaneously aid in complex outlining of a situation and the unveiling of character’s multi-layered position. Constant (verbal, often also concrete) questioning additionally strengthens the basis and underlines the problematic existential situations in the centre of the film. Thus, the viewer doesn’t identify with the protagonists but continually tries to get to them. The structure of the story is open and prevents the prediction of an outcome, so the viewers participate in the film and, in some way, also in its making. In his opus, Žilnik often makes use of half-documentary episodic narration by which he broadens or outlines the context as well as slightly blurs the open political stance. The protagonist’s mentality is revealed through intertwined biographical and fictional elements.
After mentoring young documentarists at the Luksuz workshop in Krško, and visiting Macedonia and Kosovo, Želimir Žilnik, an incarnate explosion of a multidimensional subject, rooted in the sixties and the Yugoslav New Wave, is coming to Slovenia, straight to FeKK. And he’ll be bringing news.