the American films. The German The Sons of the Great Bear (1966) turned the traditional American "Cowboy and Indian" conventions on their head, casting the Native Americans as the heroes and the American Army as the villains - this was well within the established tradition of Karl May's highly successful German Western novels (such as the Winnetou series), but had some obvious Cold War overtones. The film started a series of "Indian films" by the East German DEFA studios which were quite successful. Many of the non-Soviet examples of the genre were international co-productions akin to the Spaghetti Westerns. The Sons of the Great Bear for example was a co-production between East Germany and Czechoslovakia, starring a Yugoslav, scripted in German, and shot in a number of different Eastern Bloc countries and used a variety of locations including Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Mongolia and Czechoslovakia. The Oil, the Baby and the Transylvanians is a Romanian film, which features emigrant Romanians heavily in the storyline. Gibanica westerns "Gibanica western" was a short-lived term for the Yugoslav equivalent of the Ostern, more commonly known as partisan film and, sometimes, the Partisan western. They were made in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and were about the partisans in World War II. The term "Gibanica" refers to a traditional Balkan pastry dish. Goulash westerns The Goulash westerns are the Easterns of Hungarian director György Szomjas. He directed two films (The Wind Blows Under Your Feet and Wrong-Doers) in the 1970s. See also DEFA (film studio) Native American hobbyism in Germany, a hobby consisting of Germans impersonating American Indian culture. Vsevolod Ivanov, Soviet writer who was a formative influence on the Ostern. References Film genres Western (genre) films by genre Cinema of the Soviet Union Eastern Bloc mass media