General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Marble Ass

Marble Ass (Serbian: Dupe od mramora) is a 1995 feature film by the Serbian filmmaker Želimir Žilnik that follows two trans sex workers, Merlin and Sanela, in wartime Belgrade, presenting their work as a pacifist counterpoint to the violence of the Balkans War.¹ It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 1995, where it won the Teddy Award for best feature, and it is widely described as the first film from the former Yugoslavia to openly depict LGBTQ lives.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Dupe od mramora (Serbian)
Director and writer	Želimir Žilnik²
Premiere	14 February 1995, Berlinale Panorama, Berlin²
Award	Teddy Award for best feature, 1995 Berlinale²
Running time	87 minutes (also listed as 86 and 84 minutes by festival and archive sources)²^•¹^•⁴
Production	B92, Belgrade; producers Miodrag Milošević, Želimir Žilnik, Saša Mirković, and Veran Matić²
Lead cast	Vjeran Miladinović as Merlin (Merlinka); Nenad Racković as Johnny (Džoni)²

Spoilers

Story and approach

The film's premise sets two methods of resolving conflict against each other. Merlin works as a sex worker in Belgrade, calming violent night prowlers, big spenders, lonely men, and aggressive young men, and absorbing the energy that would otherwise fall on girls, unprotected mothers, and helpless old women; with weapons, that same energy would lead to bloodshed. Johnny (Džoni) returns from the front to Belgrade with apparently similar motives, but he cools boiling blood by letting it out through holes he makes in human bodies with bullets and knives. The Film Center Serbia synopsis calls the film a discussion of the different conflict-resolution methods the two characters use.² A festival booklet describes Merlin as a lightning rod that shelters Belgrade.⁴

The film blends fiction and documentary. The East European Film Bulletin notes that the characters Merlinka and Sanela are real people, so the film exceeds genre boundaries by adopting documentary methods; the disruption of their everyday life comes with the return of Merlinka's former lover from the battlefield, which brings war into everyday life.⁵ To keep the fictionalized film faithful to its source material, Žilnik had the real Merlinka and her friends take an active role in writing the script.⁶ The Tel Aviv LGBT Film Festival notes that the film was at first conceived as a documentary, with Merlinka playing a role loosely based on her own life.⁷

Production

Žilnik, a key member of Yugoslavia's rebellious Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and a pioneer of docufiction, shot the film during the Balkans War.⁸ A chance encounter with Vjeran Miladinović, who had appeared in a few of Žilnik's earlier films, prompted the project; Miladinović introduced Žilnik to Belgrade's trans bars and hangouts, where Žilnik found that, in the midst of the war, this felt like the most normal and level-headed community.⁴ The movie was funded by the earnings of Žilnik's previous film Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time (1994).⁴

Production credits include Miodrag Milošević as cinematographer and producer, Vladimir Milenković as editor, and Dejan Kijevčanin as composer.² The film was shot on Betacam and later transferred to 35 mm and to digital formats.⁴^•²

Reception and significance

At the 1995 Berlinale the film won the Teddy Award, presented to films outstanding in their treatment of LGBTQ themes, and it was subsequently shown at numerous LGBT film festivals around the world.²^•⁴ Despite its content and cultural context, it encountered no obstacles to release and was received warmly by audiences and critics.⁶

Scholarship places the film in several frames. The New East Digital Archive calls it the first film to openly depict LGBTQ lives from the former Yugoslavia.³ A Manchester Scholarship Online chapter describes it as one of the earliest films from the region to feature an affirmative image of trans identity, with Merlinka becoming a symbol of peace and resistance.⁹ Writing in Feminist Media Studies, researchers note that Žilnik used the queer topic directly in opposing the war.¹⁰ The East European Film Bulletin reads the film's inversion as making transgender life ordinary, equal to the life of those surviving war and sanctions, and unusual only compared with those hungry for territory and blood.⁵ A Croatian peer-reviewed study describes it as essentially an anti-war film challenging the liaisons between violent power structures and gender, directed at a broader condemnation of macho culture and women's marginalization in war-torn societies rather than at individual sexual choices.¹¹

The film also marks a turning point in Serbian screen history. Film historian Nebojša Jovanović, interviewed in a Cineuropa report on the documentary Warm Film, states that a real breakthrough in queer representation came only in the 1990s with Žilnik and Marble Ass, because he cast real-life trans sex workers in a fictional story.¹²

Merlinka's legacy

Vjeran Miladinović, known as Merlinka, played the lead as a version of herself.⁸ She was murdered in 2003, and her killer was never identified.⁶ In honor of the film and the person it portrayed, Belgrade's annual LGBTQ film festival adopted the name Merlinka.⁶ Her published confessions appeared in the book Terezin sin (2001), which a Serbian transgender studies anthology describes as a significant testimony to the life of a trans sex worker in Serbia.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released 1995 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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