Brains was followed by what is perhaps both the most famous and the most notorious of Godina’s short films. Litany of Happy People (1971) won Godina two awards at the acclaimed Oberhausen Short Film Festival in Germany, while censorship at home, desperately trying to decipher Litany’s cryptic subtext, in the end decided to ban the film merely on suspicion that it contained ‘certain’ inappropriate hidden messages. Litany is literally a poem, one long song about the marvellous variety of people populating rural Vojvodina, the northwest region of Serbia, including Serbs, Croats, Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Macedonians, Russians, Germans, Roma and many, many more (over twenty different ethnic groups peacefully share 8,000 square miles of Vojvodina). While precious as an ethnographic document, an experimental musical or simply an amazing, rapid display of faces and colours, Litany perhaps stands out mostly because of its elusiveness.

Jurij Meden