Brooklyn - Gusinje

85 min, 16 mm, color

1988

Photographs from the film

A young seamstress, Ivana quits her job in a sweatshop in Novi Pazar and accepts an offer to become a waitress in a joint privately owned by Mr. Šećo in Gusinje, a Montenegrin village at the Yugoslav-Albanian border. She meets the head waitress and the two become friends soon, and live together. Brothers Skelzen and Becir come to Gusinje from New York on a holiday, they meet the waitresses and a romance ensues. We watch the meeting of Serbian and Albanian cultures, languages, customs and family traditions in the fascinating mountainous landscape. The men promise the girls marriage and life in America. There are numerous obstacles in the realisation of the plan and the brothers return to New York alone.

Written and directed by: Želimir Žilnik
Camera: Dragoljub Mančić
Edited by: Vladimir Milenković
Sound: Ratko Kušić

Cast: Ivana Žigon, Lidija Stevanović, Skelzen Uljević, Bećir Uljević, Šećo Šabović

Production: TV Beograd

Resources

Press clipping_Brooklyn - Gusinje_1989

Želimir Žilnik (born in Niš in 1942; currently living and working in Novi Sad) has written and directed numerous feature and documentary films which have reaped many awards at domestic and international film festivals. Žilnik is renowned as an initiator of the "docudrama" genre.

Learn more

About

This web site gives an overview and is an attempt to create an educational research platform dedicated to the contextualization and problematization of the relationship between Žilnik's artistic engagement and the political and social environment of his work, from the beginning of 1967 to the present. Through a collection of three research projects, the diverse material that is before you is a corpus for further analysis, valorisation and systematization of Žilnik's cinematographic work.

This web site contains research essays, information about complete filmography and material (press clips, photographs and inserts from films) from the personal archive of Želimir Žilnik, who is the rights holder of published photographs and clips. We would like to thank Bora Ćosić for the permission to digitalize and publish within this project special issue No 3 of magazine ROK, dedicated to the Žilnik's movie Early Works, as well to all authors of published newspaper articles and authors of essays who are copyright holders of the given material. We would like to thank RTV for permissions to show films of Želimir Žilnik First Trimester of Pavle Hromiš, The Comedy and Tragedy of Bora Joksimović, Vera and Eržika during the online screening programs, and RTS on the permission to show films Brooklyn-Gusinje, Dragoljub and Bogdan: Electricity, Good morning Belgrade.

Thank you RTV for the show to show during the screening of the next television film Želimir Žilnik

Publishing of this material has exclusively educational purpose and it is dedicated to future use in personal, research and and non-commercial intent. For any further use of the material, it is advisable to contact authors.

The web site is conceived as an initial platform and is the result of work on projects “For an Idea – Against the Status Quo” (vol.1 / vol.2) 2009-2011 which was realized in the co-production of Center_kuda.org and Playground production from Novi Sad, “An Introduction to the Past” 2009-2013 Center_kuda.org, and “Shadow Citizens” 2017-2018 realized in co-production of a curatorial collective What, how and for whom / WHW from Zagreb and Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst from Oldenburg.