Kino OKO: Open-Air Screening – Yugo Goes to America

This year, Kino OKO is taking you to the vineyard! In collaboration with Franković Winery, we have prepared a special screening of the film Yugo Goes to America at the Santa Lucia vineyard, where one of Franković Winery’s signature Istrian wines is produced.

Instead of a cinema hall, we’ll be watching the film among the vines, outdoors, on a summer evening. Along with the film, there will be a glass of wine and a chance to spend the evening a little differently – at the Santa Lucia vineyard, with a good film and good company.

Yugo Goes to America

What happens when three young people from Serbia get into a legendary Yugo and decide to drive it across America?

In their feature-length documentary debut, directors Filip Grujić and Aleksa Borković follow a journey from New York to Los Angeles, covering more than 10,000 kilometres across 23 U.S. states. Their vehicle is not a luxurious car built for American highways, but a Yugo – once the pride of the Yugoslav car industry, which eventually earned a rather infamous reputation in the United States as one of the worst cars ever made.

But Yugo Goes to America is not just a film about a car. The Yugo becomes a kind of time capsule and a link between two worlds. Along the way, the protagonists meet Americans who remember the Yugo and its brief adventure in the United States, as well as many of the car’s fans today. Through these encounters, a more personal story gradually emerges – a search for roots, identity and a connection to a country that the filmmakers, born in the 1990s, know more through stories, memories and inherited experiences than through their own.

The film is at once a road movie, documentary and humorous adventure, full of unexpected encounters and situations. Because, of course, travelling across America in a Yugo is not always easy – the car ends up at the mechanic’s several times, while driving through the Texas heat without air conditioning is just one of the adventures that awaits them.

The film had its world premiere at CPH in Copenhagen and its Croatian premiere at the Pula Film Festival.