[2] His Slovene father Konrad "Slobodan" Žilnik [sr] who fought as part of Partisan guerrillas in southern Serbia was captured and killed by Chetniks in March 1944,[2] and posthumously honored as a Yugoslav People's Hero.

[3] As a student, he was chosen to take part in an international cultural exchange program in New York City, where he was first exposed to films that dealt with social and political criticisms.

[6] The film, which was an allusion to Karl Marx's early writings, critiqued the Yugoslav communist regime and depicted the murder of a young woman named Jugoslava by her comrades after their revolutionary ideals failed to be implemented.

[2] In 1986 he made Pretty Women Walking Through the City (Lijepe žene prolaze kroz grad), a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which predicted that nationalist tensions would eventually cause the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

His 1988 black comedy The Way Steel Was Tempered (Tako se kalio čelik) was nominated for the Golden St. George award at the 16th Moscow International Film Festival in the Soviet Union.

[16] The scholar Roland Hsu of Stanford University writes that "there is probably no filmmaker who has explored the dynamics of postwar European politics, economy and culture with more persistence and vigor" than Žilnik.

[1][2] Many of his films are seen as a prophecy of future events, such as the Breakup of Yugoslavia, economic transition from socialism to neoliberalism, erosion of workers' rights and wider issues related to labor and migration.