Emir Kusturica

Born on 24 November 1954 in Sarajevo, Emir Kusturica (Емир Кустурица) is a Serbian director, musician and producer. Author of nine films, several television and short films, he also plays guitar in a rock band. Among his many prizes, he has received two Golden Palms in Cannes for When father was away on business and Underground, and the silver Bear (Special Jury Prize) in Berlin for Arizona Dream.

Emir Kusturica was born in Sarajevo, main town of current Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even though Bosnian Muslim, his family has Slavic orthodox roots. His father Murat, as many millions of other Yugoslavs, had renounced to his faith to become a communist. Emir, only son, denounced the communism to become… director. Young Emir, certainly more by curiosity than to oppose his “good” family (his father worked in the Ministry of Information of Bosnia and Herzegovina1)), went easily with “bad guys” of Sarajevo. His parents decided to send him abroad at 18 to protect him from such people. Since he was always in the neighbourhood cinema of Sarajevo, they sent him to learn cinema. A cousin was then leaving in Prague, Emir was thus sent to the prestigious FAMU, the school of Prague from which Miloš Forman, Jirí Menzel or Goran Paskaljević were graduated.

Quickly appreciated, his first short films take this student out of the crowd. His teacher had already noticed it : Guernica, but more again Titanic which denounces the anti-Jewish racism under the WW2, had already given a favourable impression and he said : ”the only thing you'll leave behind you will be your film ; the end justifies the means”. This sentence marked him and helped him complete his first personal projects, like the very risky When father was away on business, denouncing the politic deportations in the communist Yugoslavia, subject still taboo at that time, shortly after Tito's death. Until then, Emir had always shot in his own language, using even the actor's local accents, to enhance the pluralism of Yugoslavia : in this way Do you remember Dolly Bell ? is the first Yugoslav film that was shot Bosnian, and not in the official language of the country, Serbo-Croatian (the equivalent of “BBC English”). Emir makes then an ambitious project with his scenarist : make a trilogy on the cosmopolitan city of Sarajevo. The second episode will be When father was away on business, but the unexpected Golden Palm will drive Emir into another world, and he will leave unfinished this trilogy.

To calm down, Emir Kusturica drops the camera for a while after Cannes' victory. He plays some bass guitar in a punk-rock band of Sarajevo : Zabranjeno Pušenje (smoking forbidden). The band is subversive, lyrics are corrosive, style is eclectic. In these years, Emir meets Dr. Nele Karajlić, the leader of the band.

The Golden Palm had opened all the doors of the cinema to him : large budgets are proposed. Emir thinks about different subjects, different places, but finally it's in his own country that he directs Time of the Gypsies, after having read articles about Gypsies dealing with human beings. Emir digs the subject with a journalist, and spends several months in one of the largest gypsy camps in Europe, near Skopje in Macedonia. At the end of the shooting, Czech director Miloš Forman calls him in New York to replace him at the Columbia University. Editing of the film Time of the Gypsies will be finished there.

After a long time of thinking, it's in English that he shoots his next film : Arizona Dream. One of his students of the Columbia University gives him a script about the American dream. But meanwhile, war starts in the Balkans, and far from his family, Emir cannot work any more. The shooting turns into a nightmare, and the film takes a darker colour…

Murat, Emir Kusturica's father, dies of an heart attack soon after the family house in Sarajevo is sacked. The family finds refuge in Montenegro. After this experience, Emir feels he needs to get