Searching for Queer History:

LGBTQ Representation and National Memory Narratives in the Region of the Former Yugoslavia

Author

Anamarija Horvat

Abstract

In 2024, Ivona Juka’s film Lijepa večer, lijepi dan / Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day (2024, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, Canada and Cyprus) was unanimously chosen as Croatia’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar. To many, this choice was surprising. On the one hand, the film became the topic of controversy surrounding its depiction of queer intimacy, with its explicit sex scenes contradicting the general lack of representation of queer sexuality in Croatian cinema. On the other hand, what made Beautiful Evening equally controversial was its choice of presenting both the history of the fascist Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) and the socialist Yugoslavia through the perspective of its gay main characters, who are equated in the film with a drive towards liberty and against censorship, and are unequivocally presented as heroes. While the choice to approach national history through a focus on LGBTQ characters might at first glance appear surprising, this article sees Juka’s film as representative of a larger trend within queer cinema in the broader region of former Yugoslavia, where gay and lesbian characters often appear in narratives which thematise questions of national trauma and memory. Be it Parada / The Parade (Srđan Dragojević, 2011, Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia), Ustav Republike Hrvatske / The Constitution (Rajko Grlić, 2016, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Republic of Macedonia), or Go West (Ahmed Imamović, 2005, Bosnia and Herzegovina), the topics of war, national trauma, and queerness often intersect onscreen, crafting a particular history of regional gay-themed cinema produced by mostly straight-identified directors determinedly looking back. Drawing on this, the article examines how national memory is presented in the region’s queer cinema and offers a comparative analysis of key queer memorial films in the region. In doing so, it seeks to untangle whether these films can indeed be considered queer, or simply instrumentalise queerness to address other issues, as a number of scholars have previously argued.

Keywords

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, queer, cinema, memory, trauma.

Introduction

In September 2024, a screening took place in Zagreb’s Forum cinema. It was the national premiere of Ivona Juka’s Lijepa večer, lijepi dan / Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day (2024, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, Canada, Cyprus), unanimously chosen as Croatia’s contender for the 2025 Oscars. Considering this prestigious position, the Forum cinema was perhaps an unlikely contender for the film’s national premiere, situated as it is on the grounds of student halls (themselves located outside the city centre) and therefore not well-known among many Zagreb residents. The film was screened for a further six days and, at the time of writing (November 2025), has not yet been released for wider distribution in Croatia.¹

This startling lack of visibility, coupled with the ostensible recognition given to its artistic merit, culminated in reports of the film’s director Ivona Juka complaining that she was given insufficient funds to campaign for the Best International Feature Oscar, and that this lack of funds was the result of deliberate censorship of the film’s queer themes (Roxborough 2024). More specifically, the film received less than half the budget given to Dubravka Turić’s Tragovi / Traces (2022, Croatia, Serbia, Lithuania), as well as Nebojša Slijepcević’s short film contender Čovjek koji nije mogao šutjeti / The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (2024, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, France), which received more than double for its campaign. A particular paradox thus arose, with Beautiful Evening nominally receiving critical acclaim and the backing of the national film body, while simultaneously being consigned to both partial invisibility on the international awards circuit and total invisibility in national distribution.

What, one might wonder, made the film so controversial? While certainly not Croatia’s first queer film, Beautiful Evening was doubtlessly its most explicit one, with sex scenes not shying away from full-frontal nudity in moments of arousal. However, this is not why this article begins with this film. Instead, I start with Beautiful Evening precisely because it is a prime example of what might be termed queer memorial cinema in the regions of the former Yugoslavia.² The film focuses on a group of gay protagonists who are first depicted as standing up to the fascist regime of the Independent State of Croatia (a puppet state of Nazi Germany) during World War II, and then later to the censorship of Tito’s government during Yugoslavia. As such, it serves as another example in a line of films produced in the region which simultaneously tackle questions of national memory and queerness. Be it Parada / The Parade (Srđan Dragojević, 2011, Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia), Ustav Republike Hrvatske / The Constitution (Rajko Grlić, 2016, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Republic of Macedonia), or Go West (Ahmed Imamović, 2005, Bosnia and Herzegovina), the topics of war, national trauma, and queerness intersect onscreen, crafting a particular history of regional gay-themed cinema produced by mostly straight-identified directors determinedly looking back. Drawing on this, the article examines how national memory is presented in the region’s queer cinema and offers a comparative analysis of key queer memorial films in the region. In doing so, it builds on research on post-Yugoslav queer cinema and seeks to untangle whether these films can indeed be considered queer instead of simply gay-themed, as some scholars have claimed (Moss and Simić 2011; Simić 2012).³ The article also takes into account local tensions in critical reception (e.g. the discrepancy between feminist and queer critiques of some of these films, and celebratory reviews in the mainstream press).⁴

Looking (Queerly) Backwards: LGBTQ Memory in Post-Yugoslav Cinema

In approaching the question of queerness and memory in post-Yugoslav cinema, I build on the work I first developed in my book Screening Queer Memory: LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary Film and Television (2021), where I argue that, for queer communities, memory functions in specific ways which differ from those of other minority communities. In particular, queer memory is rarely passed on in families, with family members usually either unaware or deliberately silent surrounding familial queer histories (Gelfand 2018; Horvat 2021). At the same time, contact between different generations of LGBTQ people is frequently highly limited (Russell and Bohan 2005), leading to a lack of memory transfer among generations. Due to this, I argue LGBTQ people depend in greater measure on mediated memory forms such as film and television, as their histories are also rarely taught in schools or commemorated by the nation-state. In this sense, the inclusion of queer people within cinematic memory narratives can be a way of including LGBTQ people into national cultural memory (Jelača 2016).

While that book focused on the American and British contexts, my recent work on post-Yugoslav cinema (Horvat 2023; Horvat forthcoming) examines how national cinemas in the region approach queer issues. In particular, the histories of war and trauma which have marked the area mean that the cinemas of many former Yugoslav nations have also become cinemas of memory (Jelača 2016). Within this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that queer representation also frequently becomes linked to questions of trauma and national culpability (ibid.). Ironically, this has for decades been one of the central critiques aimed at queer representation in the region, with films helmed by mainly male heterosexual directors often being accused of misrepresenting gay people and not being authentically queer (Simić and Moss 2011; Simić 2012). In particular, Kevin Moss writes that in Central and Eastern European gay cinemas, “the filmmakers use homosexuality as a metaphor to explore anxieties about ethnicity” (Moss 2012: 353) and national identity. Similarly, another article by Moss and Mima Simić about lesbian cinema in Central and Eastern Europe argues that “instead of real lesbians, what these directors are selling are simulacra, mere metaphors, which serve only to construct national allegories”​ (Moss and Simić 2011: 280).

These critiques are apt lenses through which to approach many of the queer-themed films made in the region. Certainly, while many of these films depict LGBTQ characters, they often marginalise their perspectives, exclude representations of the queer community, and feature inaccurate or muddled representations of gender or sexual identity. For example, Rajko Grlić’s The Constitution features a queer character for whom it is unclear if he is gay or trans, raising the suspicion that this lack of clarity stems from the writer and director’s own confusion about the terms. Similarly, films like The Constitution, Fine Dead Girls, and Go West all fail to show a queer community but only focus on the queer character or couple as isolated, disconnected figures. This can generally be read as symptomatic of the films addressing themselves towards the straight majority and positioning themselves as ‘pleas for tolerance’ or greater understanding. In turn, they tend to be well-received mainly in mainstream newspaper criticism, but often critiqued by feminist and queer presses (Žmak 2016; Duhaček 2025; Simić 2006).

While there are significant differences among these films (Beautiful Evening, for example, functions as a memory film while centring the perspective of a group of gay men, instead of marginalising it), many of the films that preceded it share these traits. Nonetheless, while these criticisms are often accurate, the films themselves are nevertheless worth approaching with respect to how they present the interrelationship between memory, queerness and nationhood. In this article I build on work by Dijana Jelača, who argues that a “scholarly approach that seeks to dismiss a text based on what is not there misses an opportunity to consider a text as a machine with many gears (to evoke Deleuze and Guattari), a machine that does rather than simply is” (2016: 107; emphasis in the original). Further to this point, Jelača writes that “standard scholarly approaches to these films — approaches that, although important, have sought to identify the films’ lacking as queer texts and have, therefore, often veered into the domain of sheer dismissal that rests on the premises of (in)authenticity”, therein failing to examine the ways in which “these queer-themed films perform a reversal, whereby centrality is given to queer traumatic affect and queer cultural memory” (Jelača 2016: 106). My own scholarly position stands somewhere in the middle, acknowledging (as Jelača herself does) the above-mentioned criticisms of many of these films, while also seeking to engage with the perspectives they bring towards national trauma and memory.

Moreover, I am cautious of the ways in which critiques of these films have sometimes brought a Western bias to their framing, with Moss writing that, “Western films on gay themes, which should have been known to the directors, but apparently were not, could also have provided models” (2012: 366), a claim that equates successful or authentic queer cinema with Western queer cinema. This is especially problematic considering the fact that scholarly work tracks the presence of queer themes in the cinemas of the former Yugoslavia (Jovanović 2016; Šepetavc 2025), as well the fact that Eastern European queer histories often remain ignored in favour of Western narratives of the queer past, therein leading to an ignorance of LGBTQ-rights movements in the area, and of their cinematic legacies, for example the fact that the first Gay and Lesbian film festival actually took place not in the West, but in Slovenia in 1984.

Nonetheless, as I have mentioned earlier, local critiques of these films are often as passionate as Moss’, stemming from the fact that the films are rarely seen as being an authentic reflection of the communities they depict. This is particularly prominent when one considers the fact that films produced by members of the community, while regarded as more authentic, receive less attention than those made by heterosexual male directors. Building on all of this, the next section will delve deeper into how memory and queerness have been addressed in a number of films produced in the region. In doing so, its goal is to track overarching changes in themes and narrative trends, whilst also looking at whether and how approaches to depicting queer communities have evolved.

Searching for Community: Queer Images in Post-Yugoslav Film

Widely regarded as the first post-Yugoslav queer film in the area, Želimir Žilnik’s Dupe od Mramora / Marble Ass (1995, Serbia) was released in early 1995, when the wars in Bosnia and Croatia were still ongoing. Žilnik, already well-established in the region as one of the key auteurs of the Black Wave, centres the film on two transgender sex workers who encounter a Serbian war veteran just returned from the front. Considering this was a time of extreme nationalism in Serbia, which valorised the soldier as the ultimate embodiment of heroism and the nation (Gould and Moe 2005), it is significant that Žilnik’s film subverts such expectations, instead depicting him as violent, uncontrolled, and homicidal. Clearly, then, any semblance of morality is located elsewhere, thereby speaking to a critique of nationalism.

At the same time, the film centres on the character of a trans sex worker played by Merlinka Vjeran Miladinović, who was herself a trans sex worker, well-known in Beograd at the time. Consequently, Žilnik’s casting significantly predates current conversations surrounding trans actors being cast in trans roles (at the time, Western representations of trans characters routinely featured cis men, for example, Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992, United Kingdom, Japan). Apart from being a key onscreen representation of transness, Merlinka’s legacy also echoes in the fact that, following her tragic murder in 2003, the film festival Merlinka was named in her honour in 2009 in Beograd, also later travelling to Sarajevo in Bosnia and to Podgorica in Montenegro. Consequently, while not strictly speaking a film concerned with realist dialogue or plotlines (comparisons to John Waters’ work frequently come up), the depiction of nationalism as pathological in Marble Ass, while simultaneously rejecting the pathologisation of trans identities, remains especially relevant. Furthermore, as I have elsewhere argued (Horvat 2023), the collaboration between nations in organising Merlinka points towards the ongoing collaboration between regional queer activists, which, far from ending with the breakup of Yugoslavia, continues today and is intimately linked to anti-war activism. This should also be seen as queer memory work, with the commemoration of Merlinka across borders in Bosnia and Montenegro pointing towards activist tendencies of preserving and commemorating queer histories beyond borders, as well as the awareness that the queer history of one Yugoslavian nation has also often been intimately linked with that of its surrounding nations.

Seven years later, Maja Weiss’ Varuh meje / Guardian of the Frontier (Maja Weiss, 2002, Slovenia, Germany, France) became the first feature-length film in Slovenia directed by a woman. The film tracks a group of young women who go on a camping trip close to the Croatian border and are warned against crossing into its “dangerous, backwards” land. However, upon accidentally stepping over the border, the women instead encounter a queer male couple living happily together, whilst conservatism is instead located firmly within Slovenian national borders through the character of a threatening politician. In their work on the film, Baker, Szczygielska and Zorko (2021) argue that Guardian of the Frontier functions as a commentary on contemporaneous debates in Slovenia regarding joining the EU, especially with respect to its self-positioning as “more European” than its other Balkan states, which were instead seen as more “barbaric” and less “civilised”. By situating conservatism within Slovenia itself, Weiss’s film critiques this proposed binary, thereby also addressing questions of homophobia and feminism through its central female characters, two of whom find their queerness together during the journey.

Depicting queerness between women as a lens through which the nation is criticised also takes place in Dalibor Matanić’s Fine mrtve djevojke / Fine Dead Girls (Dalibor Matanić, 2002, Croatia). Upon its release, the film received widespread critical acclaim in Croatia and has since also been adapted for the stage (again directed by Matanić) at a time when opposition towards gay marriage was rising in Croatia. However, as I have recently written elsewhere (Horvat forthcoming), it is impossible to regard the film now without taking into account the recent allegations against its director, who has been accused by more than 200 women of sexual harassment (Ramić 2024).

Considering the film both critiques misogyny and homophobia, while simultaneously featuring a harrowing rape scene which foregrounds violence against women, I argue it is counterproductive to try to ‘separate art from the artist’, especially when taking into account Matanić’s success within a regional cinema marked by a lack of funding (ibid.). Moreover, his success cannot be separated from the concurrent difficulties faced by women when entering the cinematic landscape, especially considering allegations that his alleged harassment resulted in the removal of women from projects (specifically, screenwriter Koraljka Meštrović has gone on record as saying she was removed from a project following her refusal to provide Matanić with oral sex (Radoš 2024), as well as reports received by journalists that nearly all his female students in the directing degree programme at Zagreb’s Academy of Dramatic Arts have been on the receiving end of his harassment (Ramić 2024).

Consequently, any analysis of Fine Dead Girls needs to take into account both the production context, which has resulted in the fact that the film is, to date, the only feature-length fiction film about lesbians in Croatia (but not the only non-fiction film, with examples like Dana Budisavljević’s documentary Nije ti zivot pjesma, Havaja / Family Meals (2011, Croatia) generally regarded as more authentic. At the same time, the film still needs to be examined as a cinematic work, in no small part due to its prominence, as well as the efforts of its cast and crew. Like the other two films mentioned in this section, Fine Dead Girls also uses queerness as a lens through which to criticise the nation, focusing on prejudice against different minorities (both the lesbian characters and the Roma minority). Similarly, it is precisely the characters who embody heterosexuality and Christianity who are presented as the real villains, like Daniel (Krešimir Mikić) who, upon being rejected by one of the queer women, proceeds to attack and rape her, with the camera focusing on his cross pressed against her face, and therein centring the role of religious hypocrisy in the attack (Horvat forthcoming). As Dijana Jelača argues (2016), the house the lesbian characters move into in the film is presented as Croatia in miniature. It is therefore not coincidental that its cast of inhabitants features a traumatised but violent war veteran, therein highlighting the continued presence of memories of war and trauma.

While Matanić’s veteran character is a violent heterosexual, the soldier becomes a queer figure in Ahmed Imamović’s Go West (Ahmed Imamović, 2005, Bosnia and Herzegovina), which presents a doomed romance between a Bosnian Muslim Kenan (Mario Drmać) and a Bosnian Serb Milan (Tarik Filipović) during the Bosnian War. The film features Shakespearean elements of tragic romance and crossdressing out of necessity as the two find themselves unable to flee the country, with Milan being drafted into the Bosnian Serb army, while Kenan is forced to pretend he is his female partner to escape murder. The majority of the narrative takes place in a small village, with Milan’s father Ljubo (Rade Šerbedžija), undergoing an inner transformation which eventually finds him supporting the gay relationship, and bitterly resenting the Orthodox Church for its propaganda. While critical of Serbian nationalism, the film simultaneously makes the bizarre choice of assigning true villainy to the character of Ranka (Mirjana Karanović), a village woman who forces Kenan into having an affair with her upon discovering he is a man and, once he finally rejects her, cuts off his penis in a fit of rage. The consequent notion of violent femininity being the main antagonist within the context of war carries especially sexist undertones, considering the well-documented use of rape as a weapon of war against both Bosnian and Croatian women at the time. Furthermore, the director’s conflict with feminism came to a head once Croatian lesbian activist and cultural critic Mima Simić criticised the film, to which Imamovic responded by calling her a homophobic slur. Such a response is especially problematic from a director whose film is about gay characters, thereby putting into sharp relief the question of who gets to present which community. Imamović’s queer retelling of the Bosnian war thus became an ideologically murky project, both by virtue of its narrative sexism and the director’s behaviour.

The question of memories of war also comes to the forefront in another film, Srdan Dragojević ’s Parada / The Parade (2011, Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia) which can unequivocally be termed the most popular queer-themed film in the region of the former Yugoslavia. Upon release, it became the most viewed release in Serbia in 2011, while its box office in Croatia surpassed the most viewed Croatian film of the previous decade, prompting columnist Marko Vidojković to write that Dragojević organised “the biggest Gay Pride in the Balkans” (2011). Like many of the films mentioned here, it is a co-production, in this case between Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and the Council of Europe. It depicts the unlikely friendship between a gay man and a homophobic war criminal, building on the buddy-comedy genre to provide a commentary on nationalism, homophobia, and national memory. Of all the films mentioned here (save Juka’s Beautiful Evening), it is the only to feature any depiction of the queer community, as well as of queer activism, bringing them in dialogue with another unlikely band of comrades – a group of former war veterans from former Yugoslavian countries, all of whom are, like the Sebian war veteran, also depicted as criminals.

It is the very improbability of this set up that Dragojević mines for comedy, therein presenting an ideologically contradictory film which, on the one hand, argues for tolerance and a battle against the status quo, whilst on the other presenting the history of wars in the area as one in which, to put it simply, each side is as criminal as the other, and culpability, by extension, rests on no one’s shoulders. Such an approach is especially problematic not only considering the history of these wars, but also the current state of Serbian politics, which still encourages revisionist views of Serbia’s culpability for genocide and other war crimes (cf. Horvat 2023). At the same time, the film occupies a particular position in Dragojević ’s oeuvre, with Nikola Kojo once more playing the character of a Serbian soldier who is also a criminal, therein harking back to the film Lepa sela, lepo gore / Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (Srđan Dragojević, 2011, Serbia), a film which has rightfully been critiqued for its presentation of the Serbian army as less culpable than Bosnian soldiers.⁵ Kojo’s role in The Parade can thus be seen as a sort of cinematic answer to his role in Pretty Flame, with The Parade thus occupying several contradictory positions – with, on the one hand, its message against homophobia being deeply emotionally resonant with audiences, while at the same time foregrounding a deeply problematic depiction of history which, while clearly parodic not meant to be taken at face value, echoes revisionist historical narratives (Horvat 2023).

Like The Parade, an opposites-attract buddy-comedy format is echoed in Rajko Grlić’s Ustav Republike Hrvatske / The Constitution (Rajko Grlić, 2016, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Republic of Macedonia), a film which presents the budding friendship between a Serbian police officer (Dejan Acimović) and his queer fascist Croatian neighbour (Nebojša Glogovac). If the combination between these adjectives strikes the reader as odd, I need also to add that, apart from the nonsensical approach to the character’s ideological leanings (it is never explained why he has adopted his hateful father’s support of the Ustasha government during the Second World War), the film is also not clear about whether the queer character is gay, transgender or occupies another gender identity (Horvat 2023). As Jasna Žmak (2016) argues on the Croatian feminist portal Vox Feminae, the film’s “major problem” is that “it opens space for the complete relativisation of all of these identities”, thus equating fascist political leanings with other identity markers like queerness or nationality. As I have argued elsewhere (Horvat 2023), these contradictory ideological messages bring The Parade and The Constitution together in spite of their differences in genre and form. At the same time, Grlić’s engagement with queerness once again centres the lone queer individual, divorcing him from both living romantic partners and any semblance of queer community.

This is not the case in Ivona Juka’s Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day. As mentioned in the beginning of this article, it centres a group of men, immediately stressing the presence of a queer community. These men are presented at the very start of the film as rebels, standing up to protect the Jews and Serbs targeted by the Croatian government during the Second World War. The film then skips into the 1950s, where these men are depicted as filmmakers who have caught the eye of state censors, only to eventually be condemned as political prisoners to Tito’s famous penal colony, the Naked Island (Goli Otok), where beatings and rape are graphically depicted. While the film ends tragically, Beautiful Evening emphasises moments of joy and community among the queer characters prior to this, leading to a depiction that both meets the “Bury Your Gays” trope,⁶ and rejects a narrative in which queerness is solely equated with sadness and suffering.

As mentioned at the start of this article, both the lack of Croatian screenings for the film, as well as the director’s accusations that she was given insufficient funds for the film’s Oscar campaign take the matter of censorship from the film’s diegesis into the context of its release. Juka has also spoken of the problems of censorship surrounding its production, stating that “three locations cancelled [on] us because they heard we were filming a gay story, while [the producer] had huge problems with local film funds, who cancelled on us at the last moment” (Goodfellow 2024). Such censorship was further reflected in the opposition towards the film’s explicit sex scenes, which Juka says she was advised by people in the industry to cut, but refused to do so (ibid.). Consequently, the film became politically potent on two fronts, the first being its centring of queer characters in its retelling of history, and the other being its centring on an overt and unapologetic depiction of queer sexuality. As such, it presents what can potentially be seen as the ‘next step’ of post-Yugoslav queer memorial cinema, moving away from a depiction that privileges the heterosexual gaze, and instead foregrounds both queer sexuality and community.

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined the tendency in post-Yugoslav cinema to use depictions of queer people to look back at national histories. While this impetus is not present in all queer cinema made since the breakup of Yugoslavia – films like Diši duboko / Take a Deep Breath (Dragan Marinković, 2004, Serbia and Montenegro) and Dvojina / Dual (Nejc Gazvoda, 2013, Slovenia, Croatia, Denmark), for example, take a different approach – it nonetheless marks a number of films, especially those produced by prominent heterosexual male directors. These directors and their films have often been accused of representing the queer community inauthentically, as well as prioritising other issues – such as those of national memory – as opposed to centring queerness. As this article has demonstrated, the focus on memory has led to differing engagements with nationalist ideologies, with the films often speaking to their contemporary commemorative contexts, which often seek to promote contentious revisionist narratives. For example, Juka’s Beautiful Day begins with a rebellion against the fascist powers in Croatia during the Second World War, and it is worth stressing here how this contradicts revisionist tendencies in contemporary Croatia which seek to exculpate its government at the time (Delauney 2025). Nonetheless, the engagement with memory is sometimes muddled, as can be seen in films such as The Parade and The Constitution, which present contradictory ideologies that simultaneously critique nationalism and discrimination, while also echoing revisionist memory narratives.

At the same time, the question of whether these films can be considered queer as opposed to simply gay-themed remains relevant and leads to differing answers depending on the film in question. As this article has argued, many of these works fail to authentically represent queer protagonists, thereby leading to a queer cinema that depicts same-sex attraction while lacking queerness. In particular, there is an absence of depictions of the queer community, as opposed to lone queer individuals or, at best, the doomed queer couple. Although it is tempting to argue this is changing – after all, films like The Parade and Beautiful Evening do present their queer protagonists as parts of a group of queers – I am cautious of arguing that this is an overall trend, as depictions of the lone and lonely queer individual also continue to reappear, for example, in The Constitution. Similarly, the narrative trend of queer characters meeting a tragic death (the Bury-Your-Gays trope) continues to mark films made across different decades, such as Fine Dead Girls, Go West, The Parade and Beautiful Evening. In this sense, it is impossible to claim that queer cinema in the region has followed a definitive trajectory, but rather that ways of engaging with both national memory and queerness continue to move backwards, as well as forward. These cinematic memory narratives, therefore, act as a mirror, reflecting the precarious position faced by queer people in the present. In particular, they are indicative of the unequal access to funding in the region’s film industries, which makes queer people themselves less likely to be able to make feature-length films about their own community. Consequently, the debate about what constitutes ‘authentic’ representation is unlikely to abate soon, with queer people continuing to see themselves only partially reflected onscreen.

Anamarija Horvat
Northumbria University
a.horvat@northumbria.ac.uk

Acknowledgement

This publication was supported by Northumbria University, School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries.

Bio

Anamarija Horvat is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication and Digital Cultures at Northumbria University. Her research expertise lies in queer and feminist studies, and her monograph Screening Queer Memory: LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary Film and Television (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines how onscreen representation shapes queer memory. She is currently co-editing the upcoming books Consuming Saltburn: Desire, Disgust and Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave, 2026) and the revised second edition of the Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality (2027). She has also published a number of works in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Critical Studies in Television, Transnational Screens, NECSUS and in edited collections and encyclopaedias. She is chair of the Feminist and Queer Workgroup at NECS.

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Filmography

Ahmed Imamović, 2005, Go West, Comprex.

Dalibor Matanić, 2002, Fine mrtve djevojke / Fine Dead Girls, Alka Film Zagreb.

Dana Budisavljević, 2011, Nije ti zivot pjesma, Havaja / Family Meals, Hulahop.

Dragan Marinković, 2004, Diši duboko / Take a Deep Breath, Norga Investment Inc. & DV Solution.

Dubravka Turić, 2022, Tragovi / Traces, Kinorama, Corona, Tremora.

Ivona Juka, 2024, Lijepa večer, lijepi dan / Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day, 4film, Quiet Revolution Pictures, ORKA Production Studio, Caretta Films, Depo Production, Tastemaker Studios.

Kukla, 2025, Fantasy, Krug Film, December.

Maja Weiss, 2002, Varuh meje / Guardian of the Frontier, Bela Film, Taris Film.

Nebojša Slijepcević, 2024, Čovjek koji nije mogao šutjeti / The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, Antitalent Produkcija, Contrast Films, Les Films Norfolk, Studio Virc.

Nejc Gazvoda, 2013, Dvojina / Dual, Perfo Production, Studio dim, Beo film.

Neil Jordan, 1992, The Crying Game, Palace Pictures, Channel Four Films, British Screen, Nippon Film Development.

Rajko Grlić, 2016, Ustav Republike Hrvatske / The Constitution, Interfilm, In Film Praha, Revolution, Sever & Sever.

Srđan Dragojević, 2011, Parada / The Parade, Delirium Films, Eurimages, Film and Music Entertainment, Forum Ljubljana, Mainframe Productions, Sektor Film Skopje.

Urška Djukić, 2025, Kaj ti je deklica / Little Trouble Girls, SPOK Films, Staragar, 365 Films, Non-Aligned Films, Nosorogi, OINK.

Želimir Žilnik, 1995, Dupe od mramora / Marble Ass, Radio B92.

Suggested citation

Horvat, Anamarija. 2025. “Searching for Queer History: LGBTQ Representation and National Memory Narratives in the Region of the Former Yugoslavia”. Queer Memories (ed. Katja Čičigoj and Jasmina Šepetavc). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 21. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00021.417.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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