Koki, Ciao

This experimental autobiography is narrated by Koki, a long-lived parrot kept beside Marshal Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia for over 35 years. Drawing on four years of recordings and newly revealed state archives, the film returns to Brijuni Island, where animals once served as diplomatic symbols. Koki recounts a life of political spectacle, now continuing in tourist captivity.

Quenton Miller: 'Koki had been at the centre of Tito's diplomacy on the Brijuni Islands, a group of islands off the Istrian peninsula where animals arrived as state-defining symbols during the time of the Non-Aligned Movement. So Koki's position is not only between species, but between states. As I went through tens of thousands of archival photos, I began to find pictures of a white cockatoo not only with Tito and Jovanka Broz, but with Sukarno, the Ceaușescus, Elizabeth Taylor and many others. Like the geopolitical narrators of Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016), Koki is a profoundly dislocated kind of speaking state-animal.’

— Excerpted and adapted from 'Koki, Ciao / Interviews, Press Etc.', Berlinale Shorts, 17 February 2025