On Tour Amsterdam 26 Sep · Rotterdam 29 Sep · “Yugo Goes to America”
Eastern Neighbours Film Festival is kicking off its On Tour autumn season with two screenings of the road movie Yugo Goes to America.
Join us at at Rialto De Pijp in Amsterdam on Saturday 26 September 2026 and at KINO in Rotterdam on Tuesday 29 September for a trip across America in the iconic Yugo. The screenings will be followed by a traditional Balkan cocktail.
Three young friends from Serbia drive a decades-old Yugo from New York to Los Angeles, retracing the forgotten journey of Yugoslavia’s most infamous export in this funny and poignant road documentary.
During one summer, three Serbian millennials travel across America in a Yugo, once called the worst car ever made. Their journey spans 23 states and more than 10,000 kilometres, tracing the unlikely story of a small socialist car exported to competitive Reagan’s America in the 1980s. Thirty-three years after the last Yugo was imported to the United States, they set out to fulfil the car’s final bucket-list journey. Along the way, they explore their roots, meet fellow Yugo lovers, and uncover the unexpected ways a forgotten car connects two distant worlds.
Session 1: Saturday 26 September at 14:30 – Rialto de Pijp, Amsterdam
Session 2: Tuesday 29 September at 19:30 – KINO, Rotterdam
Original title: Yugo ide u Ameriku | Year: 2026 | Duration: 87′
Country: Serbia, Croatia | Language: Serbian, English | Subtitles: English
Director: Filip Grujić, Aleksa Borković | Production: Čarna Vučinić – Naked; Restart | Screenplay: Filip Grujić | Cinematography: Aleksa Borković | Editing: Kristina Todorović | Sound: Tihomir Vrbanec; Aleksandar Blažić, Ivana Finci
FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION)
CPH:DOX, 2026 – World Premiere | Beldocs, 2026 – Audience Award for Best European Documentary, Special Mention (Program Teen) | International Film Festival Kino Otok – Isola Cinema, 2026 | UnderhillFest, 2026 | Pula Film Festival, 2026 | Dokufest, 2026
DIRECTOR’S BIO
Filip Grujić (1995) is a writer, playwright and film director from Belgrade, where he teaches at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. He is the author of the bestselling novel And Then, All Over Again (Booka, 2023), The Tenant (Lom, 2020) and The Sinful Days of Cocky Johnny (Samizdat, 2017). His plays have earned him the Mihiz Award and two Sterija Awards, and have been translated, performed and studied internationally.
Aleksa Borković is a director of photography and a director who works in music videos, feature films and documentaries. He is an alumnus of the Sarajevo Talent campus (2021) at the camera department. He studied Digital Arts at the Faculty of Media and Communications, where he currently works as a student demonstrator. He directed the short feature film Wait for Me Here, which had its world premiere at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival. Yugo Goes to America is Filip and Aleksa’s feature-length directorial debut.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The film emerged as an intimate attempt to search, through a great cinematic adventure, for answers to a few questions: what does it actually mean to be the worst? How can something considered the best in one place become the worst somewhere else? Who decides that, and does such a title have an expiration date? In Yugoslavia, the “Yugo America” project was announced as the deal of the century. It carried the hope of reviving the economy and presenting Yugoslavia to the Western world as a technological power. Yet in the United States, the Yugo was soon ridiculed as the worst car in history. We were born in the 1990s and grew up around the Yugo our parents drove while the country itself was falling apart. In Western popular culture, the Yugo, much like Yugoslavia, became a synonym for collapse, conflict, and the villain in films.
