Marble Ass

Turning Times: Regarded as Yugoslavia’s first openly queer film, it won the Berlinale Teddy Award for best feature in 1995 while the Yugoslav Wars were still going on and Serbian nationalism was at one of its peaks. A trans couple see their job as hustlers in 1990s Belgrade as a pacifistic mission, curbing the urges of rapists, gamblers and horny young men during turbulent periods in a war-torn country. “I was even surprised that there were no protests against the film. Nobody tried to censor it…they said it was a bit extreme, but we had had extreme films before [during the Black Wave era]. All these aggressive, angry, political types, they were focused on the war. That was their obsession.”  The film belongs to Želimir Žilnik's less well-known works and is rarely listed in the post-Yugoslav film canon. Vjeran Miladinović Merlinka, the star of the film, was murdered in 2003. Merlinka, Belgrade’s annual LGBTQ film festival, is named in her honor. (Clarissa Thieme)