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The characters of Živojin Pavlović's seminal film The Rats Woke Up (Buđenje Pacova, 1967), regularly discussed in the context of the Yugoslav Black Wave cinema, offer significant and very intriguing figures of dissent. The film depicts misfits, bottom-dwellers, and dissidents living on the margins of society in the largest and capital city of Belgrade at a time when Black Wave authors have been breaking some new grounds for Yugoslav cinema and influencing artists well after the movement became a part of history. This essay concentrates on the characters and their interaction, the complexity of which suggests the complexity of Pavlović's criticism of everyday life and institutions in the 1960s Yugoslavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]