Kenedi, Lost and Found
Kenedi is Getting Married
Two years after completing Kenedi Goes Back Home, Zilnik stumbles upon his main protagonist in Vienna. Kenedi proceeds to retell the dramatic story of his recent past. Two years before, he had decided to climb over the walls of Fortress Europe again to reunite with his family and was caught while illegally crossing the border between Hungary and Austria. After spending months in a deportation center he finally managed to escape, but the Austrian officials have him cornered again and are about to evict him to Serbia. Kenedi decides to build a house for his family there and settle down, yet he puts himself under significant financial strain, causing him to ponder his future options.
Perhaps it is in the restless gypsy Kenedi, who feels like he does not belong anywhere, that Zilnik has found his archetypal hero—someone willing to stand up for the people the director has been supporting for decades. Celebrating this particular cycle as Zilnik’s most personal work, film curator Jurij Meden describes Kenedi as Zilnik’s alter ego. In this third installment, Kenedi is desperate and in a severe financial crisis after building a house for his family. He decides to hustle for quick money turning tricks, but when he finds out about new liberal European laws on gay marriages, Kenedi sees possibility and begins looking for “marriage material” in order to obtain legal status in the EU.