Youth film in Russia and Serbia since the 1990s

This thesis explores the youth film genre in Russia and Serbia since the 1990s. Youth film is not only an essential means of tracing changes in cultural perceptions about young people and their lives in the post-communist period, but I argue that the genre serves as a means of representing society as a whole. The youth film genre, as an overarching framework dictated by the age of a film’s protagonists, encompasses and adopts a wide variety of sub-genres. This flexibility in youth film allows for an innovative study of the position of one genre as part of a wider sphere of genre film-making in the post-communist period. In particular, I demonstrate that global genre theory can be used as a means to examine the different genre types that have appeared in the cinema of Russia and Serbia in the post-communist period. The film industries of both nations were required to undergo vast changes in the transition from communism to capitalism, making film genres and audience preferences more significant than before. The films I analyse in this thesis borrow extensively from Hollywood genre types, using deviations and national-cultural references to appeal to their domestic audiences. However, I also contend that genres were an important part of the film industries of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and that these genre histories must be considered. My close analyses of six youth films provide the communist and post-communist context for their genre usages, placing them within a wider canon of films from particular genres. This thesis contributes not only to the understanding of the youth film genre and the different ways in which these films are made, but also to knowledge of the use of genres in recent Russian and Serbian cinema as a whole. The chapters of this thesis examine how youth films and youth audiences have become increasingly important to post-communist film industries. I demonstrate that youth film allows directors not only to depict the trials and tribulations of growing up during the transition from communism, but how these youth films often reference the suffering of adults in this period. Young people are situated in a historical limbo, between the communist past and the capitalist future, and as such become a poignant metaphor for the wider experience of transition in these two nations