Dropouts and Dreamers Film Series: THE WAY STEEL WAS TEMPERED (1988)

DCP | 1988 | directed by Želimir Žilnik | Yugoslavia | 101 minutes | BCMS with English subtitles Free admission. No registration required. Steelworker Leo is surrounded by chaos at work and at home. While the decaying factory is drowning in corruption, his marriage is ruined after he falls for a teenage girl. But when foreign business partners and collectors of socialist realism visit the factory, they are so impressed by its atmosphere and by Leo as an authentic example of a socialist worker that they offer him a promising career abroad as an antiquated curiosity. Over half a century after Nikolai Ostrovskii's novel How the Steel Was Tempered, Želimir Žilnik's absurdist comedy revisits socialist realist classics from the ruins of its utopian project. Post-screening discussion led by Lora Maslenitsyna (Slavic Department/ Film and Media Studies) will follow. This screening is part of the “Dropouts and Dreamers: Films of the Socialist 1980s” series, which explores the experiences of youth in the state socialist world during the transformative period of the 1980s. Presented by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.