Educational Fairy Tale

Miss Beauty 62

Sarcastic look at a 1962 Yugoslav beauty contest.

Damned Holiday

To Makavejev, each tombstone is a vicar for its resident spirit; it haunts, roams, and makes conversation.

Smile 61

Socialist work ethic meets youthful exuberance and lightheartedness where backbreaking labor does not ruin anyone's summer vacation.

Don't Believe in Monuments

A young woman tries to make love to a park statue, but despite her passionate efforts, the monument remains cold and heartless. "Don’t Believe in Monuments" is an early short, where Makavejev subtly ridicules Yugoslav state-sponsored monument and history worship.

Censored without Censorship

Through the conversation with Yugoslav film authors and excerpts from their films, this documentary film tells a story of a film phenomenon and censorship, and its focus is, in fact, a painful epoch of Yugoslav film called “a Black Wave”, which was the most important and artistically strongest period of Yugoslav film industry, created in the sixties and buried in the early seventies by means of ideological and political decisions. The film tells a great “thriller” story of the ideological madness which characterised the totalitarian psychology having left multiple consequences felt up to our very days. It stresses similarities between totalitarian regimes defending their taboos on the example of the persecution of the most important Yugoslav film authors. Those film authors have, however, made world careers and inspired many later authors. The film is the beginning of a debt pay-off to the most significant Yugoslav film authors.

Beekeeper's Scrapbook

An examination of the surprisingly morbid world of 17th and 18th century Slovenian beekeeper drawings to guide the bees back to the right hive.

Parade

Filmed in Belgrade in 1962, Parade documents the city’s engagement with the annual May Day celebration by largely ignoring the formal procession. Instead, Dušan Makavejev records the informal moments surrounding it: workers, officials, wanderers, and organizers negotiating space, hierarchy, and appearance. Shot with a detached, humorous eye, the film assembles a mosaic of everyday behavior that reveals the contrast between official ceremony and lived social reality.

The Soldier's Tale

A soldier, returning home from war, chances upon a stranger who offers to buy his violin. The stranger is none other than the devil.

Innocence Unprotected

A documentary about the famous athlete and movie enthusiast who made Serbia's first sound film, Innocence Unprotected. The Nazi occupation of Belgrade prevented the film from gaining wider acclaim. Director Makavejev intersperses clips of the original film with interviews of surviving cast and crew members, as well as newsreel and archival footage.

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

After many adventures, a young female switchboard operator starts a love relationship with a serious young man. But while he's away on business, she gets lonely and succumbs to her colleague's passes.

Balkan Spirit

Filmmaker Hermann Vaske explores the creative Balkan world in the hopes of understanding the meaning of "Balkan spirit".

Montenegro

Marilyn Jordan, an American, lives in Stockholm with her Swedish husband and family. Her behavior is bizarre, perhaps mad: she poisons the dog's milk and advises the dog not to drink it; she sets the sheets afire as her husband sleeps; she crawls under the dining table to sing. While detained at airport customs for carrying pruning shears, she meets a young Yugoslav woman and goes with her to a Gypsy enclave where she's fought over, takes a lover, helps with the sordid entertainment at a bar, and returns home more dangerous than before. The film also tells parallel stories of Marilyn's daughter becoming a junior homemaker as the young immigrant practices her striptease.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism

What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation.

Man Is Not a Bird

A Serbian engineer falls for a younger woman, but he is inept at courtship.

Hole in the Soul

A self-portrait documentary of Dusan Makavejev who travels to former Yugoslavia, and charts the changes of the society which parallels to his own life.

Danish Girls Show Everything

Despite its suggestive title, this multi-part Danish omnibus film is not a work of exploitation. Instead, it presents 20 different short films (back-to-back) on the general theme of Danish women, directed by filmmakers including Krzysztof Zanussi, Monika Treut, Gustav Hamos, David Blair, Vibeke Vogel, Dusan Makavejev, Morten Skallerud and Lars Norgaard. Some dramatic vignettes mix with other comedic ones, but all are offbeat and experimental. The picture includes one animated sequence (by Norgaard).