Series

Želimir Žilnik: Essential Work

 This series celebrates the films of Želimir Žilnik and highlights the filmmaker’s exploration of work in its most multifaceted and overlooked forms, including unemployment, migrant labor, housing and homelessness, sex work, and work as a political ideological concept. Featuring Žilnik’s best-known film, Early Works (1969), together with experimental short films rarely screened in North America, Essential Work considers work as a critical category and thematic thread that runs across the filmmaker’s six-decade-long career. In addition to sharing with audiences the films of Želimir Žilnik, this series, with its reference to the COVID-era coinage “essential workers” and “essential work,” invites viewers to consider the continued resonance of labor and work as critical categories that bring into focus social inequalities and structural modes of injustice. This partnership is supported through IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program.

Additionally, on October 4, scholars from around the US will visit Bloomington for a discussion of Žilnik’s films at FAR:Center for Contemporary Arts. For more information, check out FAR's website.

Curated by Nicoletta Rousseva of the Dept. of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures with support from IU Cinema, Center for Documentary Research and Practice, and the Russian and East European Institute.