To look at Marble Ass today, 30 years after release, is to see a film of raucous humour, rampant imagination, and empathetic collaboration. It’s a DIY miracle, made with Betamax tapes borrowed from an Austrian TV news crew (blown up later to 35mm), and a cast drawn almost entirely from the trans and gay sex workers of the streets of Belgrade in the mid-90s, as the Yugoslav wars raged on only a few hours from the capital. The star of the show is Merlinka (a sex worker and occasional actor) as the matriarch, essentially playing herself, helping her sisters stay safe and fighting toxic nationalism with love and sex. The film’s very creation was an act of resistance against the ultranationalist, hard-right ideologies that surrounded Marble Ass, but its longer-term legacy is knottier. From the distance of history, it seems a miracle it even exists, but then on closer inspection it seems self-evident. Of course it exists: it must.
Let’s set the scene. Belgrade in 1995 was a rabidly hypercapitalistic, virulently nationalistic city. Slobodan Milošević had taken advantage of economic downturn and an increasingly nationalistic intelligentsia to install himself into increasingly more powerful positions since 1986, with various allies dotted around the then-functioning, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual country of Yugoslavia. He may have emerged as a member of the Communist party in Socialist Yugoslavia, but his rhetoric was far-right populism, predicated on singling out Others within Yugoslavia and Serbia. The Yugoslav National Army and paramilitary forces supported by Milošević were committing war crimes and acts of genocide in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, who had declared independence from Yugoslavia by that point. Though Serbia itself was largely untouched by shells at this time, a UN embargo and hyperinflation (peaking at a monthly rate of 313 million percent in January 1994) had decimated living standards, with state assets being stripped by predatory organised crime.
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Marble Ass’s director, Želimir Žilnik, stumbled into Merlinka one night in Belgrade whilst waiting for a train, when Merlinka tried to pick him up as a john. She then started joking with him, complaining he couldn’t recognise her (she had a small role in an earlier film of his in the ‘80s, out as a gay man back then). The two got talking and Merlinka introduced Žilnik to her friends, a community of trans sex workers. The initial plan was to record a straight documentary, but that had to be scrapped when one of Merlinka’s clients heard the crew make a noise whilst filming and started shooting.
So, they decamped to Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city and Žilnik’s base for much of his career and got to work. Žilnik crafted a basic script, about an old friend of Merlinka’s – Johnny – returning from the war in Bosnia now scarred and unstable, bursting with ugly ultramasculine energy and wreaking havoc in the domestic safe haven Merlinka has built with her best friend Sanela. Žilnik would hand the actors the script and they would transform it into language they felt comfortable in, a gloriously ratty Belgrade street-slang. The best pitch for the finished film is “John Waters turns up in mid-90s Belgrade”, and Marble Ass does share Waters’ chaotic, DIY early work, but it also harks towards Billy Wilder comedies, the American underground scene of the 1960s, and to Pedro Almodóvar’s ostentatious early works.
Žilnik’s collaborative, all-in-it-together process was one he had been perfecting since his emergence as part of the Yugoslav Black Wave in the 1960s, a groundbreaking movement alongside fellow luminaries such as Dušan Makavejev and Aleksandar Petrović that earned as much international acclaim back then as its counterparts in Czechoslovakia, the USSR and Poland. His first feature, Early Works (1969), was an adaptation of Marx and Engels, which criticised the Socialist Yugoslav state, then still under the rule of Tito, essentially for not being socialist enough. It won the 26-year-old director a Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 1969. In the intervening years, Žilnik had a few films forcibly stopped, censored or confiscated in Yugoslavia before going into exile in Germany, where he once again made a film that was censored (Public Execution, still unavailable for public exhibition there). By the late ‘70s, he returned to Yugoslavia and continued to pioneer his unique mode of filmmaking, a slippery mix of fiction and documentary that we might otherwise today label as docufiction.
Crucial to all Žilnik’s work is the integration of the subjects into the creative act. Whether that’s his fellow Gastarbeiter in Inventory (1972), each one descending a staircase in an apartment building and stating their name, age and country of origin; or the homeless folks he invites into his flat in the Black Film (1971); or the factory unionisers and anarchist group who provide the cast of The Old School of Capitalism (2009), all of his films are alive with that sense of collaborative imagination. The films always include the forgotten and the marginalised, but instead of the hotshot film director turning up to gawp, they’re invited to join in and create a film together.
Such was the case with Marble Ass, which premiered in the winter of 1995, by which point filmmaking in the former Yugoslavia had collapsed to a trickle – a far cry from the glory days of the ‘60s. Emir Kusturica’s Underground would go on to win his second Palme D’or that year, but that film’s many qualities were tainted by it being a co-production of the state-owned RTS, staffed with Milošević apparatchiks. In contrast, Marble Ass was produced by B92, a then-independent broadcast station, critical of the nationalistic chauvinism displayed by Slobodan Milošević, and often under threat from police and the legal system. Threats and harassment of government critics, all allied to a populist, right-wing obsession with ethnic purity and cultural enemies, helped by a compliant mainstream media, a passive state bureaucracy, an acquiescent judiciary, and enough political leverage to change the state’s constitution almost at will. Sounds familiar? In many ways, Slobodan Milošević pioneered the far-right playbook of the 21st century.
And yet, on release Marble Ass passed largely unnoticed by such figures. Mid-90s Serbia was no haven for queer folks but, inadvertently, the sheer tunnel vision created by the war allied to the general feeling of lawlessness in Belgrade allowed this wildly radical film and its actors to exist freely, as if it had found a blind spot within the state’s targets for cultural Othering. Merlinka and Sanela were regulars on chat shows for a brief time, always emanating charisma and intelligence, the line of questioning from hosts and other guests often more baffled than outraged. Perhaps it’s also the genuinely celebratory, joyous nature of the film (though cognisant of the violence that surrounds it), and its takedown of a litany of masculine Balkan stereotypes that shields it from targeting: the film exists, and so do its characters. For Marble Ass, there is no debate beyond that.
It was only in the 21st century that LGBT+ rights in Serbia became a flashpoint for violence and active targeting – energies sated elsewhere, the time had come to focus hatred inward. Merlinka, sadly, was murdered in 2003 (the culprit is still unknown). Her legacy lives on: the Merlinka Film Festival was set up in 2009 as the first LGBT+ film festival in the former Yugoslavia. Yet Serbia’s current President Aleksandar Vučić, in power since 2014, is little more than a successor to Milošević (during his time as a junior minister under him he once said “for every Serb killed we will kill 100 Bosnian Muslims”), and has presented himself as a moderate centrist when committing the actions of an authoritarian autocrat.
The collapse of a newly-renovated train station in Novi Sad which killed 15 people in November 2024, reconstructed with great fanfare by Vučić’s government, has led to mass student protests, continuing as I write this. When the protests started, the founder of Merlinka Festival, Predrag Azdejković, celebrated police brutality against protestors with deeply transphobic comments, functioning largely as a mouthpiece and cheerleader for Vučić’s party. Meanwhile, B92 has long since been bought out by figures close to the ruling party.
In a roundabout, tangential way, Marble Ass has been appropriated by the same people who otherwise created the hellish world it emerged from, using it as a token of legitimacy to cover for their lack of regard for human rights and decency, one casualty amongst many in the rampant corruption and ideological bastardisation so endemic to the modern world. But Marble Ass still exists, in all its over-the-top glory, its joyousness, its camp and kitsch and very real political focus – and no amount of misappropriation and political regression can take that away from the film, or from trans and queer people around the world who continue to be persecuted by corrupt systems of power.
