In 1945, Yugoslav president Tito created the Avala film studios on a hill above the capital, Belgrade. The studios were the second largest in Europe at that time, as was fitting for Tito’s Hollywood of the East. A brand new film genre was created there: partisan war epics, a sort of spaghetti easterns which depicted the heroic Yugoslav resistance to German occupiers. These superproductions became extremely popular and played a major part in advancing the national effort and fostering the illusion called Yugoslavia. Cinema Komunisto explores the myth that created Yugoslavia, the people that created its fiction and how it collapsed in the brutal reality of war. Today, Avala Film studios is a sad ghost town of abandoned and rotting sets, out-of-date equipment, empty film lots and unemployed technicians. Anyone looking for what remains of Yugoslavia would do best to look at the films that were made during its time. Can the story of the rise and fall of the Yugoslav cinematography help explain the unity and breakup of Yugoslavia?
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