Guest Workers and Non-Aligned Friends: Postsocialist and Postcolonial Solidarity in Želimir Žilnik’s Recent Films about Migration

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the intersections of historic and contemporary trajectories of migration in Želimir Žilnik’s latest films. Docudrama Logbook Serbistan (2015) and feature film The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018) focus on contemporary African and Asian migrants who cross the Balkan route to the European Union. Both films place in conversation the histories of emigration to western Europe from (post)colonial countries and (post)socialist eastern Europe, highlighting the migrants’ shared economic alienation from European prosperity. In turn, documentary Our Man in Gabon (2014) addresses the legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement, which sent many socialist Yugoslav companies and workers to construction sites across the Global South. The films highlight the extent to which Yugoslav socialism depended on migration—the export of to both western Europe and the Global South—which, along with its legacy of Non-Aligned anticolonialism, creates potential for solidarity with contemporary migrants traveling across the Balkans.