Dušan Makavejev

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Dušan Makavejev (Душан Макавејев in Cyrillic) (born 13 October 1932 in Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia) is a Serbian film director, famous for his groundbreaking films of Yugoslav cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His first three feature films Man Is Not a Bird (1965), Love Affair (1967), and Innocence Unprotected (1968) won Dušan Makavejev international acclaim, but his next movie WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), due to sexual-political content, was banned in Yugoslavia and resulted in Makavejev's exile, which ended only in 1988. Sweet Movie, with its explicit depictions of sex, urination also relegated the film to art house audiences and has been banned in several places. There was a span of seven years before he released his next film, Montenegro. It was a successful (and more conventional) black comedy. The Coca-Cola Kid, set in Australia, is perhaps his most accessible picture, featuring performances by Eric Roberts and Greta Scacchi.

Of the latter part of his career, Bright Lights Film Journal summed it up in a paragraph: "Makavejev’s post-WR career has been halting at best. Sweet Movie (1974) was widely reviled both critically and commercially, and banned in Canada after the leading lady walked off the film in disgust. Montenegro (1981) garnered mixed reviews, while Coca-Cola Kid (1985) was seen as a failed attempt to make a commercial film. Manifesto (1989) won kudos but not audiences; The Gorilla Bathes at Noon (1993) was criticized for its aimless plot; A Hole in the Soul (1995) is a rarely seen self-portrait less than an hour long; and Danish Girls Show Everything (1996) is a comic anthology to which he contributed an entry, unscreened." ^[1]