Works by Želimir Žilnik and Shadi Habib Allah

Since his beginnings in Yugoslavia in the 1960s, filmmaker Želimir Žilnik has presciently addressed topics like migration and forms of social erosion. His provocative early works blend documentary and fiction as the subjects portray themselves onscreen and the filmmaker himself plays an active role.

For this program, Shadi Habib Allah has selected two of Žilnik’s short films, Little Pioneers (1968) and Black Film (1971), which are closely attuned to the lives of marginalized populations. Pairing them with one of his own videos, The King and the Jester (2010), Habib Allah hints at a sense of shared methods or concerns.

Writer and curator Leo Goldsmith introduces the screening.

This event is co-presented with the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago.

Leo Goldsmith is a writer, teacher, and curator. His writing has appeared in Artforum, art-agenda, Cinema Scope, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he was Film Editor from 2011 to 2018. He is a co-author of Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics (Wiley 2015), by Robert Stam with Richard Porton, and is currently writing a forthcoming book about the filmmaker Peter Watkins with Rachael Rakes. He received his PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University, and has taught courses in film and media studies and art history in the Center for Experimental Humanities (NYU), CUNY Brooklyn College, Harvard Summer School, and The New School. He has curated film programs and exhibitions for the Museum of the Moving Image, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, UnionDocs, Anthology Film Archives, Heliopolis Project Space, and Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius).