“Reality Doesn't Impress Me That Much”

Conversation with Kukla at 2025 Autumn Film School Against Oblivion: Queer Film and Memory

Author

Tisa Troha

Abstract

This essay offers a critical overview of the work of director and musician Kukla, as discussed in conversation at Kinoteka’s 2025 Autumn Film School Against Oblivion: Queer Film and Memory in Ljubljana. It situates her practice at the intersection of queer cinema, post-Yugoslav heritage, and contemporary pop aesthetics. Rather than engaging in nostalgia, Kukla’s films and music mobilise the fragments of former Yugoslavia as generative materials for imagining alternative futures. This approach is framed through the concept of Yugofuturism, understood not as longing for a lost state but as nostalgia for the possibility of a worthy future, shaped by a generation that encountered Yugoslavia only through its remains. Through readings of the music video Crne Oči / Black Eyes (2017, Slovenia), the short film Sestre / Sisters (2021, Slovenia), and the feature debut Fantasy (2025, Slovenia, North Macedonia), the author examines Kukla’s use of magical realism and work from within genres, often dismissed as lowbrow and shows that central to her practice is a transnational and queer perspective that embraces fluidity and marginality as sites of creative power. Particular attention is given to her feminist and queer politics, with an emphasis on the relationships between vulnerability and strength, and between modernity and tradition in regard to ancestral gender variance. Ultimately, Kukla’s oeuvre emerges as an intuitive yet politically resonant practice of myth-making, reclaiming shame-laden cultural inheritances and reassembling them into a distinct emancipatory aesthetic.

Keywords

Kukla, Balkans, Slovenia, feminism, queer, cinema, pop, vibe, heritage, gender, genre, magical realism, Yugofuturism.

Modernist mass housing projects, traditional attire, turbofolk – there is no separating Kukla’s¹ body of work from the fragments of the post-Yugoslav milieu that permeate it. Despite their often sympathetic initial appearance, the diverse (sub)cultures and settings of the former republic are never filtered through the rose-tinted glasses of naive nostalgia. Instead, the narrative significance and multilayered meanings Kukla assigns to them point to another, far more complex relationship to this heritage, characteristic of a transitional generation “born right when Yugoslavia was dying” (Kukla 2025), for whom these forms are experienced only as remnants of another world, one with its own sense of future. Despite not identifying with the concept explicitly, Kukla’s lens captures the core affect of Yugofuturism, a stance that “does not have to do with feeling nostalgic for a country or a political regime. Rather, Yugofuturism engages the nostalgia for the feeling of having a (worthy) future” (Brezavšček 2025: 26). The idea that the relics of a shared past can function not as attractors for nostalgia, but as generators of new imaginaries in a fragmented and alienated world of capitalist realism, marked by a “generational pessimism” (ibid.), comes into focus as Kukla describes her relationship to the specific conditions of a transitional time and place:

I'm really interested in ancestral things and giving them a new life, breathing new life into those things […] I don't know what it was like to live there. I can just read about it and listen to my parents, neighbours, or politicians, but I don't have the real experience. However, it was some sort of graveyard of Yugoslavia for me growing up. I'm from a lot of parts of ex-Yugoslavia – I was born in a really small Slovenian town, but I grew up in Macedonia and Serbia, while visiting Bosnia a lot. It was a meeting of this past that I never experienced but in so many different ways seemed both good and bad for people. […] I think that is something really interesting to me. These are the remains of the past, the architectural graveyard of some past time, and now I have to live in capitalism and see how it interacts with me and the future. I think the sense of community is different now than it was then. That's something I've always longed for, but having grown up in a totally different system, I just try to imagine something from it. I’m much more interested in the intuitive and maybe magical or mythical than real. Reality doesn't impress me that much. (Kukla 2025)

An illustrative example of this imaginative work can be found in Illinden (also known as Makedonium), a monument in Kruševo, Northern Macedonia, dedicated to the IMARO revolutionaries of the Ilinden Uprising and the Yugoslav partisans of the Second World War. Appearing twice in Kukla’s work and shown both in its modernist, stained-glass splendour and in states of disrepair and decay, the monument functions as a symbol of hope for a different, better future. In the music video for Crne Oči (2017), it is juxtaposed with mundane vignettes of small Balkan town life – the street, the convenience store, the family kitchen. This contrast is reprised and heightened in her feature debut Fantasy (2025, Kukla), where the site offers a fleeting refuge from the eponymous transgender protagonist’s stiflingly conservative hometown, to which she must return for her father’s imminent passing. The scene’s otherworldly quality is amplified through a magical realist CGI intervention as she applies makeup for the night and makes love with her friend and lover, and the ‘spomenik’ (monument) appears less as a concrete location than as a mythical, ephemeral utopia.

Through her use of post-Yugoslav artefacts drawn from both high and low culture, folk and pop, Kukla transforms these materials into symbols within a personal mythos, imbuing them with new, loose lore. This process of what we might, by way of malapropism, call ‘vibe curation’ does not consist of collecting objects that point toward or represent a (higher) idea, but assembling objects into a unity that already is that idea in its entirety. In articulating this distinction, Peli Grietzer (2017) offers the example of the philosophical shift undertaken by modernist poets:

Where Coleridge looked to the Imagination as the faculty that vertically connects the world of things to the world of ideas for example, William Carlos Williams looked to the Imagination as the faculty that horizontally connects things to create a world.

With this shift, a creative work (and by extension, one’s entire body of work) is released from the need for an explicitly expressed, or even expressible thesis, because the aesthetic schema of the vibe becomes explicit in itself allowing it to be applied to the real world and our lived experiences within it: “a dense vibe in the imaginative landscape associated with a work of art potentially acts as a structural representation of a loose vibe of the collective objects and phenomena of a real-world domain.” (ibid.) Just as one need not be able to define the term ‘Kafkaesque’ in order to recognise it, the ‘Kuklaesque’ is already present in her body of work, assembled intuitively, magically and mythically – but also crucially through the (re)combining elements of cultural spheres drawn from a region marked by deep historical divisions. This exploration of a transnational identity emerges, in her own words, from casting off a former sense of deep embarrassment at having been born in Slovenia but not to Slovene parents:

I was ashamed because my mother has an accent in Slovenian, and my grandmother didn’t speak Slovenian. My first spoken language was Slovenian, not Macedonian. Then I went to visit Macedonia after a long time and I thought, what am I ashamed of? Somebody convinced me that my heritage and my roots are not valid, and that I have to be more Western to be accepted. For a long period growing up, I was also in Belgrade, experiencing a different culture. When I was starting to create films and music, I noticed that we are collectively so deeply ashamed of our cultural heritage and our own scenes. We don't look at ourselves as cool or modern. We all want to be from Berlin or something. Then I thought, let me take a look at my own culture. What is beautiful there? What are my takeaways from this? (Kukla 2025)

The embrace of a transnational, migrant identity is already evident in Kula’s early cinematic work. The documentary short Welcome to Fužine (Kukla, Martina Hudorović, Iztok Radej, 2009, Slovenia), for instance, addresses this theme through a discussion of the term ‘čefur’, the Slovenian pejorative used for immigrants from other ex-Yugoslav ethnicities. The film tentatively points toward the value in “the affirmation of this [...] peripheral position” (Brezavšček 2025), proposing an embrace of one’s outsider status in the same way the three friends do in both Kukla’s short film Sestre / Sisters (2021, Slovenia) and feature Fantasy, sceptically entrenching themselves on the margin of the margin. Both short films are (intermittently, diegetically) soundtracked by the same turbofolk anthems that inform Kukla’s musical work. Crucially, her approach to drawing inspiration from so-called ‘lowbrow’ pop culture is shaped by the same empowering shedding of shame, grounded in the conviction that the only way to meaningfully affect a genre and the culture surrounding it is to approach it sincerely, through an earnest embrace rather than any ironic pastiche:

That is my thing, actually – guilty pleasures. I have to be honest, sometimes I was even too impressed by turbofolk references. And then, when I discovered the scene more, I thought, oh my god, what was I impressed by? However, in all of those genres, there are still artists who reflect the times really well. That was something I was really interested in, and I'm not an anthropologist, but looking at the turbofolk scene from a different angle, you can see it from a political perspective, because it was very much influenced by politics, sometimes even created by politics. Also from a feminist perspective, it was interesting to see what floats our boat in the Balkans, how women are treated and objectified, and how we are reflecting that on ourselves. Even if it's not of great quality or deep, it's still a sincere reflection on the times and culture we live in. And I think you really have to go into it to try to change it. You can't look at it from the outside. You have to immerse yourself in it. (Kukla 2025)

The weight Kukla places on working in a genre rather than merely with a genre echoes the elaboration by filmmaker, photographer and writer Clay Mills on ‘-core’ as less a coherent movement than an identifier of a shared mood vibe and aesthetic: “not movements, not even necessarily emergent trends, though that is somewhere closer to the truth. At its purest, it’s a descriptor of interlinked phenomena.” (Mills 2020) Mills contrasts “working from within” a -core, “the whole shebang, that which completely takes in the aesthetic phenomena of that -core and thus, the aesthetic forms part of its own whole”, and “working from without” a -core, “which includes the aesthetic of a -core but only as a filter for content that doesn't necessarily have to do with it”. (ibid.) Unlike the latter (ultimately a superficial, appropriative way of engagement that decontextualises and devalues the aesthetics it uses), “when one works within a -core, the aesthetic phenomena associated with that -core often don’t emerge for their own sake, but from a specific goal(s) that naturally emanates those aesthetics”. (ibid.) This dynamic is evident across Kukla’s work in both music and cinema, which engages, from within, with questions of women’s position and role in the Balkans, spanning both the socialism of Yugoslavia and the capitalism of the present. She humorously disavows her previously favoured self-description as a “slavic gangsta geisha”, but the concept gestures towards the interplay between female strength and female vulnerability that informs her work:

I think there is no strength without vulnerability. But it's hard to be vulnerable, especially in front of many people. I'm interested in looking at ourselves fully, with all the perfections and imperfections. It's more of an exploration, me asking myself questions – I don't have the answers yet, maybe someday I will. But I think it's very important to show all the dimensions of femininity that exist because there’s this very present girlboss culture, and there's no space for mistakes. I would like for women, trans women, anybody who feels a woman in themselves to be allowed to make mistakes as well. (Kukla 2025)

The critical lens that Kukla turns to “girlboss culture” and its neoliberal feminism filtered through capitalism echoes how, with Brezavšček’s words,

it is an important historical lesson that the question concerning the oppression of women will not be solved by itself. No miraculous economic system or even technological innovation will by itself help prevent the suppression of people by gender if we do not intentionally programme it to do so. Economic reorganisation and technological innovations can be used against women, or they can work for their empowerment, depending on the agenda, as proclaimed by Shulamith Firestone. (Brezavšček 2025)

Just as the transition from socialism to capitalism failed to deliver female and queer liberation (and in some respects, even produced regression instead (cf. Šepetavc 2024: 83), a feminism that is this ruthlessly demanding of women can scarcely be deemed feminism at all. Despite Kukla’s self-professed disinterest in reality and her emphasis on fantasy, her portrayals of women, strong not despite, but because of their flaws, pay respect not just to the outstanding, but to the mundane, as she explains, when speaking about her role models:

I'm most impressed by working mothers. Simone de Beauvoir is an icon and opened a huge pathway for all of us, and of course, I am impressed by historical figures, but I think we tend to glamorise so much. [...] There's also impressiveness in just being a part of a community. I observe it more now, seeing people around me. Of course, there's Marsha [P. Johnson], there are so many great women in history; Salomé was a very big figure while I was growing up. But nowadays I'm more interested in the hidden, hidden from the pop public. Maybe also because I've met so many people from the mainstream pop scene, so I'm not impressed anymore. [...] I have a deep appreciation for the divas, of course. In every music video I do, I think of a diva. [...] It's the polarity between the working single mother and the diva. I’m neither, but I have an appreciation for those. I'm with them. (Kukla 2025)

It’s not only about locating moments of fantasy that precipitate out of the ordinary, but also about elevating the extraordinary everyday sacrifices we so often take for granted. Nowhere are these two dimensions more clearly intertwined than in the female figures surrounding Fantasy’s three friends: on the one hand, the eponymous larger-than-life diva, on the other, their mothers, aunts and cousins, each flawed but navigating the oppressive patriarchal structures in their own way. While the familial sphere is frequently, as in many real-life queer experiences, a site of conflict, Kukla takes care never to flatten this dynamic to a simple opposition of ‘chosen family good, nuclear family bad’. Instead, her approach is marked by humour, cultural sensitivity, and a sustained effort to understand the well-meaning intentions behind decisions (that nonetheless can cause harm). The matriarchal formations of single mothers and auntie assemblies are offered a moment for redemption following Fantasy’s father’s death, when, in another scene approaching magical realism, Fantasy dances for the ageing women of her extended family, and they, seeing her as the woman she is for the first time, embrace and dance with her. Particularly in discussions of queer identities, it is easy to frame the divide between traditional and contemporary worldviews as insurmountable. Yet Kukla’s work suggests that, given the chance, people can sometimes surprise us. Reflecting on how she navigates the tensions of working with settings and characters shaped by premodern and modern, colonised and colonising cultures, Kukla emphasises the importance of remaining committed to the fluidity inherent in between such dichotomies:

Again, it's very important to go from within, not from above, outside, or anywhere else. I feel this fluidity as well, and I couldn't limit myself to one or the other. [...] I don't think life is that black and white. I think that's where the magic happens. It’s a weird expression to use here, but that’s where something interesting happens, when we transcend those borders. I think that's the most human experience possible, where things are fluid and undiscovered. I'm all about those gentle disruptions, not conforming to the ideal imposed by society or a system. I'm quite interested in the ancestral world because there's also a lot of fluidity there. I was thinking about whether we had queer before the West named it queer. [...] I'm not a documentary filmmaker, so I don't go back to that time, but I try to bring some stuff from the past and translate them into the present. (Kukla 2025)

One of the ancestral phenomena Kukla engages in this way is ‘burrnesha’ or ‘virdžine’, the so-called sworn virgins: a traditional Balkanian gender variant role consisting of people assigned female at birth but who live their lives as men under a vow of chastity, recognised by the customary tribal law (Young 1998). In Sestre and Fantasy, rather than directly transposing this figure into the present, Kukla translates it into a more contemporary register, closer to the ambiguously transmasculine identities of studs, butches, bois and toms (Bailey 2014). Whether indigenous or modern, these formations challenge traditional Western conceptions and categories – not just of traditional gender, but of queerness. Kukla foregrounds this defiant potential, emphasising that it is “not just about sexual orientation or sexuality or gender. It’s really about disrupting the patriarchal societal norms, about that collision, disruption and fluid space in between” (Kukla 2025). Her position resonates with Šepetavc’s observation that “in the late 1970s and the 1980s, making queer bodies and sexualities visible and reimagining Yugoslav visual landscapes in queer ways became an explicit part of revolting against the Yugoslav socialist system in Slovenia” (2024). Yet the line between understanding and oversimplication, between respect and exoticisation, remains a fine one. Reflecting on the difficulty of representing such queer cultures without reducing their complexity or speaking over them, Kukla elaborates:

Again, it’s about going from within and giving the microphone sometimes to someone else. [...] I'm very much aware of the responsibility I have. However, I don't want to be caught in the task of making something digestible for the audience. I want to widen the space for the audience to create solidarity, understanding, or identification. [...] It's a very important question when you're an artist and you’re making something, you want to say something: what is the goal of all of this? Of course, the goal is to make art that maybe changes something or just offers a different perspective. (Kukla 2025)

Indeed, sometimes the best way to create such space for different perspectives is to give it room to speak, to simply show. In Sestre, the three friends are additionally marginalised (but also connected to each other) by being hard of hearing, a detail only shown through their use of hearing aids, but never discussed directly:

In the short film, which was a case study for the feature film, the three girls have a hearing aid device, and while it is important as part of their seclusion from everybody else, [...] I didn't want to show it as their main issue or characteristic. It’s just something that somebody has and lives with. I want everybody to accept everybody. That's my main goal, actually – my Miss Universe world peace moment [laughter]. (ibid.)

Whether on themes of queer identity or Yugoslav heritage, whether in music, video or cinema, Kukla’s approach is a highly intuitive and deeply thoughtful one. After “giving flowers to those who haven’t got theirs yet” (ibid.) so often throughout her work, we’re happy to see her receive hers too.

Tisa Troha
Independent Researcher

Bio

Tisa Troha is an independent researcher and architect with a master’s degree from the University of Ljubljana, as well as a music producer and DJ. Her work in both architecture and music focuses on the interplay between technology, pop culture, and heritage. With the collectives Nimaš Izbire and Ustanova, she organises events at the intersection of club culture and queer culture. She collaborates with Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art and is a co-editor of Šum, a journal for art theory and criticism.

Bibliography

Bailey, Van. 2014. “Brown Bois.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (1–2): 45–47.

Brezavšček, Pia. 2025. “A Manifesto for Yugofuturism: Maska’s Tools and Strategies for Imagining Possible (Feminist) Futures Inspired by Regional Pasts.” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 9 (2): 26.

Grietzer, Peli. 2017. “A Theory of Vibe.” Glass Bead, Site 1: Logic Gate: The Politics of the Artifactual Mind. https://www.glass-bead.org/article/a-theory-of-vibe/. November 24.

Kukla. 2025. Conversation with Tisa Troha at Kinoteka’s Autumn Film School Against Oblivion: Queer Film and Memory. Ljubljana.

Mills, Clay. 2020. On -Cores. Unpublished manuscript.

Šepetavc, Jasmina. 2024. “More than Comrades: Queering Slovenian Cinema in Yugoslavia.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 15 (1): 70–86.

Young, Antonia. 1998. “‘Sworn Virgins’: Cases of Socially Accepted Gender Change.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 16 (1): 59–75.

Filmography

Kukla. 2025. Fantasy. December & Krug Film.

Kukla. 2021. Sestre / Sisters. A Atalanta.

Kukla. 2017. Crne Oči / Black Eyes.

Kukla, Martina Hudorović, Iztok Radej. 2009. Welcome to Fužine. DZMP – Luksuz produkcija.

Suggested citation

Troha, Tisa. 2025. “‘Reality Doesn't Impress Me That Much’: Conversation with Kukla at 2025 Autumn Film School Against Oblivion: Queer Film and Memory”. Queer Memories (ed. Katja Čičigoj and Jasmina Šepetavc). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 21. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00021.416.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This license does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms.