Concealing, revealing, and coming out: lesbian visibility in Dalibor Matanić’s Fine Dead Girls and Dana Budisavljević’s Family Meals

Abstract

Drawing and expanding upon the scholarship that has analysed how non-heteronormative identities have been represented and discussed in the post-socialist spaces of the former Yugoslavia, this article examines two Croatian films, Fine mrtve djevojke/Fine Dead Girls and Nije ti život pjesma Havaja/Family Meals to reassess the notion that real lesbians are not represented in mainstream films from Eastern Europe. Although the two films employ diverse genres and provide substantively different points of view, they are crucial for understanding the evolution of cinematic representations of lesbians in Croatia and for evaluating the ongoing changes in public perception of sexual minorities. Through an analysis of the films’ production and consumption, their narrative structures and cinematic techniques, this article uncovers the ways in which these films offer divergent perspectives of the lesbian subject. While Fine Dead Girls uses lesbian characters as a medium that ultimately reaffirms the heterosexist project despite its director’s advertised lesbian-positive approach, Family Meals eschews pronouncements about activism and ideology to offer a nuanced portrait of a ‘real lesbian’ using the metaphor of family mealtimes. Departing from previous scholarship that presents cinematic lesbians of the Western Balkans as mere repositories of external discourses, this analysis treats homophobia and hetero/sexism as socially constructed phenomena not particular to the Balkans, and illustrates the necessity of non-essentialising views of sexuality and gender in constructing a visible lesbian subject.