Abstract
The article is devoted to the Soviet-Yugoslav (more precisely Ukrainian-Montenegrin) film of 1972, a unique example of a co-production in the socialist era. On the one hand, «Against all odds» develops the artistic method of Ukrainian poetic cinema of the late 1960s with its avant-garde visuality, the leveling of verbal means of expression and the desire for ethnography. On the other hand, the film declared Montenegrin cinematography as potentially separate from others in the SFRY (primarily from the Serbian one). Ilyenko works with a complex, encrypted language, full of metaphors and understatement, thanks to which the work remains open for interpretation in various aspects – both in formal and in content.