Skupljači perja
The Rebellious Heart of the Black Wave Aleksandar Petrović's film was a radical departure from state-sponsored optimism, choosing instead to mirror the raw, unvarnished reality of marginalized Romani communities in Vojvodina.
Aleksandar Petrović’s work betrays a genuine concern for people, places, and communities rarely seen on screen, and there is no better exemplar than his swan song, I Even Met Happy Gypsies. Set in a village on the Pannonian plain in northern Serbia, the film follows the dynamic, explosive life of the charismatic and self-destructive feather-gatherer Beli Bora Perjar.
Petrović shows all the qualities of a great painter, bringing the texture and color of people’s inner lives onto the screen. Featuring an iconic performance by Bekim Fehmiu, and the definitive rendition of the song “Đelem, Đelem” by Olivera Katarina, I Even Met Happy Gypsies is a landmark in the cinematic portrayal of the Roma, the example to which all others refer, exceeding even the films of Slavko Vorkapich, Emir Kusturica, and Goran Paskaljević in its sheer authenticity. An international sensation, winner of the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and an Oscar nominee, I Even Met Happy Gypsies is the most renowned work of the Yugoslav Black Wave. Now presented in a glorious restoration, it can be experienced for what it is: a true feast for the senses, heart, and mind.
A man bleeds to death in a mound of white goose feathers. A truncated boy hobbles on leg stumps, begging a living from passersby. A Carmenesque singer wails her miseries in a dingy nightclub. An adolescent takes a 16-year-old wife and finds himself unable to consummate the marriage, while a crowd of townspeople gathers below the couple’s window, hooting.
In all of Happy Gypsies, there is not a single happy gypsy—the title is an ironic quote from a traditional tzigane tune. The actors who play the gypsies may be elated now, however, for this Yugoslav movie has been nominated for an Academy Award. With good reason. Though it is full of flaws and inconsistencies of style, it depicts with melancholy and muted color the odd, anachronistic ways of an all-but-forgotten people.
On the Pannonian plain near Belgrade, a colony of gypsies dwells in a clot of squalor, surviving on what they earn from buying and selling goose feathers. Outstanding among them is an erotic, intemperate feather merchant named Bora, played by Bekim Fehmiu, a Yugoslav actor strongly reminiscent of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Endlessly indulging in wife-beating and mistress-bedding, Bora downs liters of wine and scatters his seed, his feathers and his future. As the film’s principal character, he meanders from confined hovels to expansive farm fields, from rural barrooms to the streets of Belgrade. Wherever he travels, he witnesses—and sometimes acts out—the gypsies’ heritage of violence and tragedy. In the process, he provides the viewer with astonishing glimpses of a rapidly vanishing life. Like the film, Bora lacks central coherence, but his days are not without a primitive beauty—the wide, unspoiled farm fields, the medieval pageantry of the Serbian Orthodox Church services, the umber, smoldering faces of the gypsy women.
Though he has a reality that belongs to him alone, Bora is manifestly meant to be a symbol as well. In his final contribution to the film’s bleak catalogue of miseries, he stabs his rival and flees the town. As he disappears, he be comes all gypsies—the Indians of rope who can neither escape nor brace the present and whose future is foreshadowed with doom.
Aleksandar Petrović’s Skupljači perja (I Even Met Happy Gypsies, 1967) stands as one of the absolute peaks of the Yugoslav Black Wave (Crni talas). It shattered the idealized, state-approved socialist realism of post-war Yugoslav cinema, replacing it with a visceral, poetic, and uncompromising look at marginalized life on the Panonian plains.
Release dateMarch 20, 1968 (USA)
Skupljaci Perja / I Even Met Happy Gypsies, 1967 Full
Aleksandar Petrović is one of the most brilliant, politically daring, and stylistically influential filmmakers to emerge from post-war Eastern Europe. As a leading figure of the Yugoslav Black Wave (Crni talas) in the 1960s, Petrović rejected the sanitized, optimistic tropes of state-approved socialist realism. Instead, he turned his lens toward existential dread, social marginalization, and the raw, complicated truths of human behavior.
The Cinematic Vision
Petrović’s films are defined by a distinct blend of gritty, documentary-like naturalism and intense, poetic fatalism. He frequently worked with non-professional actors, utilized handheld camera work, and subverted traditional narrative structures to capture life on the fringes.
Three definitive works anchor his legacy:
1. Three (Tri, 1965)
An existential masterpiece of European cinema. The film tracks a single protagonist, Miloš (played by the iconic Velimir "Bata" Živojinović), across three distinct phases of World War II. In each segment, Miloš witnesses a different face of death: as a helpless bystander, a desperate fugitive, and finally, an executioner. It earned Petrović an Academy Award nomination and is widely considered one of the finest structural films about the psychological toll of war.
2. I Even Met Happy Gypsies (Skupljači perja, 1967)
The film that brought the Yugoslav Black Wave to absolute international prominence, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes. Stripping away European romanticism, Petrović crafted a vivid, visceral look into the lives of Romani feather traders in the plains of Vojvodina. The film is a sensory explosion of local music, tragic love, and desperate freedom—embodied by the striking image of goose feathers raining down in a moment of destructive passion.
3. The Master and Margarita (Majstor i Margarita, 1972)
A brilliant, highly controversial adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical novel. Petrović transposed the narrative to reflect the stifling bureaucratic realities of his own contemporary Yugoslavia. The film’s sharp critique of political censorship and totalitarianism ultimately led to his downfall within the state apparatus; he was branded an ideological dissident, stripped of his professorship at the Belgrade Film Academy, and pressured into a period of exile.
Petrović didn't just document bleak realities; he found an incredible, chaotic poetry within them. His work paved the way for future generations of Balkan filmmakers—including Emir Kusturica—to explore regional identity with unapologetic boldness.
The Soul of the Film
At its core, the movie belongs to Bekim Fehmiu in his career-defining role as Beli Bora, a mercurial, self-destructive goose-feather merchant. Fehmiu projects an incredible, raw magnetism—caught between a desperate desire for absolute personal freedom and the inescapable gravity of his environment.
Three elements elevate this film from a regional drama to a masterpiece of world cinema:
The Cinema of Cruelty and Poetry: Petrović, alongside legendary cinematographer Tomislav Pinter, captures a brilliant contrast. The visual palette mixes the bleak, grey mud of the Vojvodina villages with sudden, explosive bursts of color and texture—most iconically, the swirling, blinding white of goose feathers.
An Authentic Soundscape: This was one of the first European films to treat Romani culture with genuine anthropological weight rather than romanticized exoticism. It features authentic Romani dialogue and a haunting musical score. Olivera Katarina’s rendition of "Đelem, Đelem" became legendary, helping catalyze the song's adoption as the international Romani anthem.
The Metaphor of the Feather: Feathers serve as a brilliant narrative device. They are light, volatile, and free-floating, yet they represent a brutal, cutthroat commodity that locks Bora and his rival, Mirta (played by the great Bata Živojinović), into a cycle of violence.
A Historic Milestone: Skupljači perja was a massive international breakthrough for Yugoslav cinema, winning the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, and securing an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
Socio-Cultural Context and Authenticity
Before Skupljači perja, depictions of Romani people in Eastern European cinema were often deeply romanticized, caricatured, or relegated to exotic background decoration. Petrović shattered this paradigm by creating a film that is deeply rooted in ethnographic reality while remaining a compelling, universal human drama.
Linguistic and Cast Authenticity: It was the first feature film in which characters spoke the Romani language alongside Serbo-Croatian. Petrović cast professional Yugoslav actors (like Bekim Fehmiu and Bata Živojinović) in the lead roles, but surrounded them with non-professional Romani actors from Vojvodina who essentially played versions of their own lives.
A Raw Mirror of Marginalization: The film does not shy away from the harsh realities of the Romani settlement: extreme poverty, child marriage, domestic violence, and a profound lack of structural opportunities. Yet, it portrays these struggles without a trace of patronizing pity or moralizing judgment.
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Sound, Music, and the Melancholy of Dert
Music in Skupljači perja is not a mere background score; it is the very soul of the narrative. Aleksandar Petrović uses traditional Romani music to channel an intense, existential despair known in Balkan culture as dert (a profound, pleasurable sorrow).
"Đelem, Đelem": Sung by Olivera Vučo (Katarina) in a smoky, chaotic café (kafana), her rendition of this traditional song became world-famous. The performance is raw and electrifying, acting as a physical release of the characters' collective grief and longing.
The Tavern Self-Harm Scene: In one of the film’s most shocking and unforgettable sequences, Bora, overwhelmed by alcohol, music, and existential frustration, breaks his wine glass and presses his bare hands into the jagged shards. As blood pools and mixes with the spilled red wine, he raises his hands in triumph, laughing through tears. It is a striking visual manifestation of a pain so deep that it can only be expressed through physical self-destruction.
To understand how Skupljači perja fits into the Black Wave (Crni talas), you have to look at what Yugoslav cinema was supposed to be doing at the time. The state wanted films that celebrated "Brotherhood and Unity" (Bratstvo i jedinstvo) and glorified the heroic partisan struggle.
The Black Wave directors—like Aleksandar Petrović, Živojin Pavlović, and Dušan Makavejev—did the exact opposite. They turned their cameras downward and outward to the margins, exposing the raw, messy, and unvarnished realities of a socialist society that hadn't delivered its promised utopia to everyone.
Skupljači perja sits at the absolute vanguard of this rebellion in three distinct ways:
1. Dismantling the Myth of the "New Socialist Man"
Mainstream Yugoslav cinema of the 1950s and 60s relied heavily on the archetype of the disciplined, collective-minded worker or partisan hero. Beli Bora is the antithesis of this ideal. He is aggressively individualistic, morally compromised, volatile, and driven by personal passion rather than civic duty. By centering a film on an anti-hero who explicitly rejects social integration, Petrović made a radical statement about the human condition under state-mandated conformity.
2. Exposing the Cracks in "Brotherhood and Unity"
While official state rhetoric championed a harmonious, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, Skupljači perja laid bare the profound economic and social isolation of the Romani people. Petrović didn't present them as a neat, integrated piece of the Yugoslav mosaic; he showed a community operating entirely on its own terms, trapped in poverty and ignored by the grand narrative of socialist progress. The film brilliantly weaponizes this contrast, using the muddy, forgotten plains of Vojvodina as a counter-site to the industrializing, modernizing cities the state preferred to showcase.
3. Aesthetic Subversion: Mud, Blood, and Feathers
The "Black Wave" earned its name because critics accused these directors of having a "black" (pessimistic, bleak) view of Yugoslav reality. Petrović and cinematographer Tomislav Pinter rebelled against the polished, clean aesthetics of state-funded epics. They adopted a style heavily influenced by the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism—using natural light, handheld cameras, and non-professional actors.
But Petrović went a step further by infusing this grit with a dark, expressionistic poetry. The violence isn't clean or heroic; it is sudden and visceral, culminating in the agonizing image of Mirta's blood spilling into the pure white goose feathers.
The Political Tightrope: What makes Skupljači perja fascinating within the movement is its timing. It was released in 1967, during a brief window of cultural liberalization. It managed to win state approval and international glory before the political climate hardened in the early 1970s, which eventually led to the banning of later Black Wave films (like Lazar Stojanović's Plastic Jesus) and the exile of several directors.
Legacy & Impact
Beyond the screen, the film redefined how the world perceived Romani culture. It set the stage for modern cinematic giants and birthed a global anthem.
Pioneering Influence
Paved the way for Emir Kusturica’s *Time of the Gypsies* and *Black Cat, White Cat*.
Cannes Validation
Solidified the international reputation of the Yugoslav Black Wave movement.
Cultural Anthem
"Đelem, Đelem" was later adopted as the official anthem of the Romani people.
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