SEE - A Fortnight in Review
Kusturica’s ecological/traditionalist bent does not end with his village – he is constantly battling to preserve the whole area of Mokra Gora from all kinds of pollutions. He introduced road taxes in order to reduce traffic and recently protested against the initiative for the exploration of nickel in the immediate area. In his letter to the Minister of Natural Resources he expressed fear that “the dirty technology” might endanger people’s health. He even established the Board for the Protection of Serbia from Nickel Mining. Moreover, all the houses in Drvengrad are using pellet heating, which has significantly lowered harmful emissions usually associated with combustible fuels. Perhaps the biggest curiosity of the village is a cemetery made specifically
for ‘bad films’, the first of which to be buried here was ‘Die Hard 4’ – which, we agree, truly was a terrible movie. But this year Kusturica went even one step fur-
Kusturica’s Nationalist/Conversion Controversy
Emir Kusturica was born in Sarajevo in 1954. His parents, Murat Kusturica and Senka Numankadić, were Bosniaks, even though Kusturica claimed that they were in fact Serbs: “My father was an atheist and he always declared himself as a Serb. Perhaps we were Muslims for 250 years, but we were Orthodox Christians beforehand. One cannot change one’s religion. We had to convert to Islam in order to survive”. Kusturica left Sarajevo during the siege in 1992 and moved to Serbia. He had sympathies for Slobodan Milošević and with his friend Peter Handke he even supported Serbian politicians in Bosnia for a while. He was criticised because his film Underground (1995) was supposedly financed by the Serbian National Television, and also for a lack of tact because Underground was filmed while the war in Bosnia was still raging. Accusations that he may have attempted to justify Serbian nationalism and war crimes in this film were probably levelled by people who had never seen it, and it must also be noted, albeit not necessarily directly in his defence, that Kusturica did eventually change his opinion of Milošević over the years. When asked by the New York Times why he did not stand up to him before, he replied: “Nobody’s perfect”. Kusturica, a practical persona non grata in Sarajevo, is of the opinion (expressed in many interviews), that the city of his birth has lost its identity, implying that it has been ethnically cleansed and that there are no Serbs left in the city. In 2005 Kusturica was baptised in a Serbian church in Montenegro and changed his Muslim name Emir to the Serbian Nemanja – causing, naturally, even more controversy.
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ther in his imaginary war against “imperialist trash” and staged a fight with the hologram of Bruce Willis. He dramatically announced this event as an “historical battle between David and Goliath”, and claimed that this event marked the triumph of auteur theory over Hollywood ideology. At the opening ceremony, Kusturica stressed that his festival aims to support true artists such as Tarkovsky, Fellini and Forman, rather than “vulgar and commercial” films. And yes, we almost forget (the wine and the hearth had lulled us into a rather tufted slumber). The winner of the main prize in a competition of 28 movies was the Swiss film Stammering Love by director Jan Czarlewski, who accordingly received the Golden Egg. The Silver Egg was given to accorded to the Danish movie Barvalo, directed by Rasmus Kloster Bro, while the Bronze Egg went to Israeli director Yaniv Linton for the film Tateh. As could only be expected, the Festival was closed by who else but Emir Kusturica, who once again stressed the importance of championing auteur films. Modern trends may not be playing his tune, but there was certainly plenty of resolve to go all the way around the table… If nothing else, we dare hope we might have at least aroused the reader’s curiosity and given him – or her – the perfect excuse to visit a rather picturesque part of Serbia – if not before, then at least right round this time next year.