‘Reality Doesn't Impress Me That Much’

Conversation with Kukla

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.