Vud, You Won!
The rise and fall of Croatian-Montenegrin filmmaker Dusan Vukotic - the only Yugoslav Oscar-winner - uncannily mirrors the tragic fate of his multi-ethnic country. Vud, You Won is a poetic documentary…
Vud, You Won!
The rise and fall of Croatian-Montenegrin filmmaker Dusan Vukotic - the only Yugoslav Oscar-winner - uncannily mirrors the tragic fate of his multi-ethnic country. Vud, You Won is a poetic documentary about Dusan Vukotic - the only Oscar-winning filmmaker from Yugoslavia, a visionary animator, and a man who believed in the freedom of the drawn line. In 1962, against all odds and competing with the latest productions from Disney and Warner Bros, Vukotic's short film Surogat (Ersatz) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short - the first time this honor was awarded to a non-American film. The news came as a shock even to the filmmaker himself, who remained in Zagreb on the day history was made. The Oscar brought Vukotic fame, institutional authority, and a place in the cultural elite of socialist Yugoslavia - but also envy and resistance from his peers. A relentless worker, he devoted every waking hour to his ideas and characters, supported by his life partner Lila Andres Vukotic, who gave up her acting career to stand beside him. But when the 1990s arrived, and with them the dissolution of Yugoslavia, everything changed. One morning in 1991, Vukotic was denied entry to his own studio at Zagreb Film - the place he had helped build into a globally recognized animation hub. It was a quiet humiliation, a symbolic end to an era.
Vud, You Won!
Documentary
Film Details
The rise and fall of Croatian-Montenegrin filmmaker Dusan Vukotic - the only Yugoslav Oscar-winner - uncannily mirrors the tragic fate of his multi-ethnic country. Vud, You Won is a poetic documentary about Dusan Vukotic - the only Oscar-winning filmmaker from Yugoslavia, a visionary animator, and a man who believed in the freedom of the drawn line. In 1962, against all odds and competing with the latest productions from Disney and Warner Bros, Vukotic's short film Surogat (Ersatz) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short - the first time this honor was awarded to a non-American film.
The news came as a shock even to the filmmaker himself, who remained in Zagreb on the day history was made. The Oscar brought Vukotic fame, institutional authority, and a place in the cultural elite of socialist Yugoslavia - but also envy and resistance from his peers. A relentless worker, he devoted every waking hour to his ideas and characters, supported by his life partner Lila Andres Vukotic, who gave up her acting career to stand beside him.
But when the 1990s arrived, and with them the dissolution of Yugoslavia, everything changed. One morning in 1991, Vukotic was denied entry to his own studio at Zagreb Film - the place he had helped build into a globally recognized animation hub. It was a quiet humiliation, a symbolic end to an era..