Forgotten Avant-Garde Film Pioneer: Vukica Đilas

Screening: Vukica Đilas, Home Movie
Performance: Audio Parazit

At the 7th Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, the Turkey premiere of Home Movies—a film by Vukica Đilas, one of the overlooked figures of Yugoslav experimental cinema, completed posthumously—is accompanied by a special mediating performance by Audio Parazit.

Đilas’s frame-by-frame, fragmented cinematic language is deepened and reinterpreted through Audio Parazit’s electroacoustic sound world. While tracing the presence of a woman artist situated between the lines of history, the performance seeks to open up a collective space of memory around this condition of invisibility.

Vukica Đilas
Vukica Đilas (1948–2001) was a Belgrade-based writer, translator, journalist, film critic, and artist. In her early years, shaped around the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade where she studied dramaturgy, she developed close ties with the Yugoslav underground and experimental cinema scene, belonging to the same generation as figures such as Tom Gotovac, Slobodan Šijan, and Lazar Stojanović.

Over the course of nearly three decades, beginning in the 1970s, she created a personal film diary using a small 8mm camera, recording fragments of everyday life. Her frame-by-frame shooting practice is grounded in an intuitive approach to montage, reconstructing the continuity of life through a fragmented visual language. In this sense, her work renders visible the everyday moments, friendships, and cultural production processes within Yugoslav intellectual and artistic circles, while simultaneously building a personal archive through fragments related to the body, intimacy, and self-representation. Despite her politically charged family background—as the daughter of Milovan Đilas and Mitra Mitrović—she adopts an approach that dissolves this legacy into the surface of everyday life rather than narrativizing it directly.

Largely invisible during her lifetime, her body of work emerged posthumously and has since been rediscovered as an experimental practice intertwining personal and collective memory. Her work continues to exist as a “life film” that dissolves the boundary between life and cinema—shot over time and only becoming legible in retrospect.

Edited by: Slobodan Šijan

Audio Parazit
Audio Parazit is a radio program produced and hosted by Aslı Kobaner, Gökçe Uygun, and Yaren Eren Budak on Apaçık Radyo, engaging with the intersections of contemporary avant-garde practices and examining the current state of the independent and experimental scene in Turkey. The program focuses on both local and international productions across sound art, electronic music, electroacoustic practices, and interdisciplinary work. Each episode invites listeners into the “kitchen” of production—its processes and hidden layers—while discussing the socio-cultural contexts of sound and music.

At the same time, Audio Parazit operates as an art collective that extends beyond the studio into various spaces—discussing, performing, improvising, listening, and creating platforms for exchange. Through concerts, panels, and improvisational performances, it sustains a dynamic environment that keeps both production and sharing alive while rearticulating a set of ethical values.

This event is realized in collaboration with Lumbardhi Foundation, with the support of Academic Film Center (AFC) and Student City Cultural Center (SCCC) Belgrade.