Winner of the Teddy for best feature at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival, MARBLE ASS is Žilnik’s breakthrough celebration of queer life in former Yugoslavia, shot during the Balkans War. Staring the late Merlinka as a version of herself, the film follows the lives of Merlin and Sanela—two trans women who turn to sex work as a means of financial security and an act of political resistance against the militant machismo of wartime culture. Their routine is shattered when Johnny, Marlin’s ex-lover, is decommissioned from the army and arrives at her house full of barely repressed rage. Referencing Paul Morrisy’s FLESH (1968) and Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), MARBLE ASS is a radically exhilarating mix of political allegory, screwball humor, empathy, and Belgrade’s ’90s underground.