Recovering Industrial Memory: Self-Management and Entrepreneurship in Jasmila Žbanić’s Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny (Ikarus Films, 2024)

Jasmila Žbanić’s film Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny (2024) revisits one of socialist Yugoslavia’s most emblematic enterprises, Energoinvest, through the life and vision of its founder Emerik Blum. The film intertwines industrial history, personal testimony, and collective memory to explore the worker self-management experiment in Yugoslavia, and specifically Bosnia-Herzegovina, including its enduring moral and political legacies. This essay situates Žbanić’s documentary within the historiography of Yugoslav socialism and the wider debates about postsocialist memory and economic imagination. It argues that the film functions both as an act of historical recovery and as a meditation on the failure of an economic utopia – offering a layered account of modernity, ownership, and belonging that challenges neoliberal narratives of progress.