Directed by Emir Kusturica • 1998 • Serbia

A careening ensemble comedy bursting at the seams with music and visual energy, Black Cat, White Cat is Emir Kusturica’s madcap tribute to the marginalised and dispossessed. The film follows the twisted romances and small-time schemes of a community of ...

Directed by Kaltrina Krasniqi • 2021 • Kosovo

Kaltrina Krasniqi’s portrait of female resilience is one of the most vital Kosovan films of recent years. Vera (Teuta Ajdini Jegeni) is a middle-aged sign language interpreter whose life is thrown into disorder by her husband’s sudden suicide. A seri...

Directed by Dušan Makavejev • 1967 • Yugoslavia

This gleefully subversive, formally skittish, and surprisingly moving oddity from the inimitable Dušan Makavejev is a high point of the Yugoslav Black Wave. Centred around the doomed romance between a Hungarian switchboard operator Izabela (Eva Ras...

Directed by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov • 2019 • Bulgaria

Husband and wife writer-director duo Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov conjure up a dramedy tinged with the supernatural in this award-winning Bulgarian gem. Following the death of an elderly woman, her bereaved husband (Ivan ...

Directed by Ena Sendijarević • 2019 • Bosnia and Herzegovina/Netherlands

Dutch-Bosnian director Ena Sendijarević concocts a summery but unsentimental coming-of-age drama out of the fault lines between Western and Eastern Europe in this award-winning feature. Born and raised in the Netherlands, A...

Directed by Aleksandar Petrović • 1967 • Yugoslavia

One of the first films from Eastern Europe to explore the lives of the Roma in sympathetic detail, and to cast Romani-speaking Roma in order to do so, Aleksandar Petrović’s Cannes-winning classic builds a complex and humanistic narrative out of...

Directed by Nadejda Koseva • 2024 • Bulgaria

Nadejda Koseva’s sophomore feature is a portrait of man at war with nature and himself. On the banks of the Danube, an elderly loner named Yovo (Alexander Trifonov) tends to his private zoo. His reclusive life is upended when his dog is enlisted for a...

Directed by Nikola Spasić • 2022 • Serbia

Nikola Spasić’s thoughtful, tender docufiction hybrid follows Kristina, a transgender Serbian sex worker and amateur antiquarian. A series of chance encounters with a former theology student named Marko disrupts her carefully ordered life, while openin...

Directed by Maya Vitkova • 2014 • Bulgaria

In 1979, Boryana’s dreams of escaping communist Bulgaria are undone by the miraculous birth, without an umbilical cord, of her daughter Viktoria. Symbolically proclaimed “baby of the decade” by the state, Viktoria lives a pampered life until the eventua...

Directed by Miroslav Antić • 1971 • Yugoslavia

Acclaimed poet turned filmmaker Miroslav Antić made his indelible contribution to the Yugoslav Black Wave with this apocalyptic tale of love among the ruins of war and natural disaster. Set in 1947, the film captures life in a Vojvodina village duri...

Directed by Dušan Makavejev • 1964 • Yugoslavia
Please not this title is not available to subscribers in the US

The debut feature from Yugoslav cinema’s greatest iconoclast, Man Is Not a Bird announced Dušan Makavejev to the world and paved the way for the Balkan nation’s Black Wave movement. Se...

Directed by Aleksandar Petrović • 1965 • Yugoslavia

The first mature masterpiece from a figurehead of Yugoslav film, Three established Aleksandar Petrović at the forefront of the so-called Black Wave movement. Across a triptych of stories, we follow a soldier named Miloš (iconic actor Velimir “B...

Directed by Ralitza Petrova • 2016 • Bulgaria

Ralitza Petrova’s uncompromising portrait of Bulgarian society’s spiritual decline is one of the most vital films to emerge from the Balkans in the last decade. First-time actor Irena Ivanova is impassively impressive as Gana, a social care nurse who...

Directed by Eliza Petkova • 2016 • Bulgaria

Eliza Petkova’s Berlin-award-winning debut explores the tension between duty and individuality in a picturesque Bulgarian village. Lora (Anna Manolova) is a 17-year-old out of step with the traditions and rhythms of her rural home. When her father dies...