This master’s thesis explores growing up, identity, and belonging in post-Yugoslav coming-of-age cinema. It approaches youth as a period in which the search for identity intersects with social, cultural, and historical circumstances. In the former Yugoslav region, this experience is shaped by the consequences of the dissolution of the shared state, post-socialist transition, changing social values, and the pressures of late capitalism.
The theoretical part draws on the work of Edgar Morin, Roland Barthes, Christopher Lasch, Guy Debord, Slavoj Žižek, and Gilles Deleuze. The analysis of selected films traces a shift from more direct representations of war, social disintegration, and transition towards more intimate questions of belonging, sexuality, the body, and everyday life. Identity emerges as an open and relational process formed between the individual and the world they inhabit.
The practical part presents the short fiction film Neighbourhood 23, which follows its protagonist Jagoda through uncertainty, the end of a relationship, and the search for intimacy and independence. Through the body, space, silence, and movement, the film explores change as a process without a predetermined destination and identity as a continuous process of becoming.
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