‘Black Wave’—a term initially meant to condemn—ended up defining one of the grittiest, most groundbreaking and transgressive currents in European cinema. Emerging from the unique, non-aligned socialism of 1960s Yugoslavia, a generation of filmmakers grabbed their cameras not to glorify the past but to anatomise the unsettled present. In this issue, we have sought to explore that rebellious and fiercely polemical film movement, which used dark humour, radical ideologies and unflinching realism to confront political myths before being silenced by the state in the early 1970s. Many of the most acclaimed films have been dissected and re-evaluated in a newer and broader context to better understand the movement. The primary inspiration behind this issue, however, was to examine the movement’s enduring legacy: how these once-suppressed films have been reclaimed as classics, inspiring new generations of artists from all over the world. This is the story of art that dared to question its own origins.