To the film enthusiast Marshall Tito, who had his own projection room and employed a full-time projectionist, cinema was also a means to consolidate socialist Yugoslavia. Filmmaker Mila Turajlić, on the other hand, raised in a state that was falling apart, draws on the wealth and glamour of Yugoslavian cinematography in her first long film to better understand her own history. In a clever montage of interviews and film clips, she tells stories of nation-building and images of a nation, but also of how the collapse of the film industry after Tito’s death heralded the collapse of her country.

The feature film “Innocence Unprotected” by Dragoljub Aleksić tells the story of a young woman who’s to be forcibly married to a horrible rich man while her true love is for a daring acrobat. This first Yugoslavian sound film was made in 1941 in occupied Belgrade and never released because of Nazi censorship. Dušan Makavejev’s deconstruction of this bizarre work, which he re-edited, partly hand-coloured, supplemented with German newsreels and current footage of former participants and thus turned into an eponymous documentary film in 1968, was awarded a Silver Bear at the Berlinale.

A door that has been closed for seventy years serves as a MacGuffin in Mila Turajlić’s double portrait of her mother and her mother country of Yugoslavia. That very door has divided the bourgeois family apartment ever since Tito’s communists assigned several rooms to proletarians in need of shelter. Srbijanka Turajlić never cared a fig for her neighbours. But when Serbian nationalists began to threaten the unity of her country, she turned into a fierce opponent of the Milošević regime. In a virtuoso montage of archive material and conversations with her mother, the filmmaker recaps the latter’s development while gaining a new perspective on the time of her own youth.