Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

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Hello, you're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me

Petra Jievich.

And today it's the remarkable story of how in 1994 the first LGBT film was made in the former

Yugoslavia.

I've been speaking to the acclaimed Serbian film director Jellimir Jilnick about how an accidental

encounter with a trans female prostitute led to him making a groundbreaking film

while his country was in the creep of a war.

The war in former Yugoslavia has added new words to the lexicon of horror.

It is May 1994 and Serbia is at war as the former Yugoslavia is torn apart in a conflict fueled by ethnic nationalism.

Serbian men are conscripted to fight while at home with the country under international sanctions, people are struggling

to make ends meet.

Everything was functioning just on the edge of complete collapse and there was despair in the atmosphere.

Shellymer Jilnick is one of Serbia's foremost directors who made his name as a

pioneering filmmaker critiquing communist rule in Yugoslavia,

but in 1994 he was on a new mission.

It all began one warm spring evening in May as he was walking to the train station in Belgrade

...