Black Film & Kenedi Goes Back Home

Programme

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  Black Film (Želimir Žilnik, 1971) (17 min.)

  What should filmmaker Želimir Žilnik do with the six homeless people he has temporarily housed in his own flat? He makes this worryingly topical problem the subject of this 1971 film.

  Novi Sad, Serbia, Friday, January 29, 1971. It’s three o'clock in the morning. Speaking straight to camera, the then 28-year-old director and lawyer Želimir Žilnik explains that in the course of the film he will try to find shelter for the six homeless men he has just picked up from the street. And this, as the viewer will see, is a hellish job.

  Given that there are no solutions to be found in the middle of the night, and he also wants his outcasts to play a role in his film, he takes all six of them back to his own flat. He yells at his guests to be quiet because his wife and child are asleep, and firmly instructs them not to take off their shoes. The next morning, armed with his camera, he heads into town to confront citizens and officials with his problem.

  Žilnik films his mission in short, self-aware scenes, with a direct and at times ironic tone that doesn’t obscure the acute and worrying topicality of the problem he raises.

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  Kenedi Goes Back Home (Želimir Žilnik, SM 2003) (75 min.)

  When he is deported back to Serbia, Kenedi, a young Serbian Roma man, starts a taxi service from Belgrade airport. His passengers are people like himself, who also have to find a new home.

  The 35mm footage in Kenedi Goes Back Home harkens back to a different time, but the refugee theme in this 2003 film is universal. It’s also a logical topic to tackle for filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, who has always concerned himself with the fate of socially marginalized people.

  Žilnik introduces viewers to Kenedi Hasani, a young Serbian Roma man who has just returned to Belgrade after living for years in Germany. Kenedi was dragged from his bed by the German police and deported to Serbia—as happened to many former Yugoslavs when peace appeared to have returned to the Balkans.

  The pragmatic Kenedi tries to make a living with a hastily purchased car. The film thus develops into a road movie in which the deported Roma riding in Kenedi’s taxi talk about how they have been flung back into an existence of old uncertainties. Their children, often born and raised in the modernity of Germany, have been displaced in their parents’ country, with a poor command of Serbo-Croatian, and must drastically adjust their expectations for the future.