Emir Kusturica (, ; born 24 November 1954) is a Serbian film director, screenwriter, actor, film producer and musician. Kusturica has been an active filmmaker since the 1980s.
He has competed at the Cannes Film Festival on five occasions and won the Palme d'Or twice (for When Father Was Away on Business and Underground), as well as the Best Director prize for Time of the Gypsies. Kusturica has won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Arizona Dream, a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Black Cat, White Cat and a Golden Lion for Best First Work for Do You Remember Dolly Bell? . He has also been made a Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Kusturica has been a member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of the Republika Srpska since 9 November 2011. Among other accolades, Kusturica became a UNICEF ambassador in 2002 and eight years later he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in France.
Kusturica has also been recognized for his projects in town-building. Since the mid-2000s, Kusturica's primary residence has been in Drvengrad, a town built for his film Life Is a Miracle, in the Mokra Gora region of Serbia. He had portions of the historic village reconstructed for the film. He published an autobiography "Smrt je neprovjerena glasina" ('Death Is an Unverified Rumour') in 2010, which was followed by four other books.
Early life Kusturica was born in Sarajevo, the son of Murat Kusturica, a journalist employed at Sarajevo's Secretariat of Information, and Senka (), a court secretary. Emir grew up as the only child of a Muslim secular familyJean-Marc Bouineau, Le Petit Livre d’Emir Kusturica, éditions Spartorange, 1993 (), chapter "Nostalghia" in Sarajevo, the capital of PR Bosnia and Herzegovina, then a constituent republic within FPR Yugoslavia. As he writes in 1993, his father's mother was "strongly tied to Muslim rites" while his father "did not belong to any cult, he was not religious at all". Kusturica primarily defined himself as Yugoslavian at least until the year 2000.
A lively youth, Kusturica was by his own admission a borderline delinquent while growing up in the Sarajevo neighbourhood of Gorica. Through his father's friendship with the well-known director Hajrudin "Šiba" Krvavac, Kusturica, aged seventeen, got a small part in Krvavac's Walter Defends Sarajevo, a 1972 partisan film funded by the Yugoslav state.
Work In 1978, Kusturica graduated from the film school (FAMU) at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, which is why he is sometimes considered a part of the Prague film school, an informal group of Yugoslav film directors who studied at FAMU and shared similar influences and aesthetics. After graduating from FAMU, Kusturica began directing made-for-TV short films in Yugoslavia.
1980s He made his feature film debut in 1981 with Do You Remember Dolly Bell?, a coming-of-age drama that won the prestigious Golden Lion for Best First Work at that year's Venice Film Festival. The same year, at age 27, he became a lecturer at the newly established Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, a job he held until 1988. He was also art director of Open Stage Obala (Otvorena scena Obala).
Kusturica's second feature film, When Father Was Away on Business (1985), earned a at Cannes and five Yugoslav movie awards, as well as a nomination for an American Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. In 1989 he earned more accolades for Time of the Gypsies, a film about Romani culture and the exploitation of their youth. In 1989 he was a member of the jury at the 16th Moscow International Film Festival.
1990s Kusturica continued to make highly regarded films into the next decade, including his American debut, the absurdist comedy Arizona Dream (1993).
He won the Palme d'Or for his black comedy epic Underground (1995), based upon a scenario of Dušan Kovačević, a noted Serbian playwright. Underground was partly financed by state-owned Yugoslav television. It recounted the history of Yugoslavia from World War II until the conflicts during the 1990s. Bosnian and French critics claimed the film contained pro-Serb propaganda.Serb director tries for third triumph, The Guardian, 15 May 2004Dispute Leads Bosnian to Quit Films , The New York Times, 5 December 1995 Sarajevo-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon, who emigrated to the United States before the war, said Underground downplayed Serbian atrocities by presenting "the Balkan war as a product of collective, innate, savage madness." French philosopher and writer Alain Finkielkraut, a supporter of the Croatian president Franjo Tuđman during the 1990s, denounced the Cannes Film Festival's jury award, saying it was honouring a creator with a thriving imagination and that the jury praised a version of the most hackneyed and deceitful Serb propaganda. It was later revealed that Finkielkraut had not seen the film before writing his criticism.
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy made a film criticizing Underground. In a discussion with Levy, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said: I hope we share another point, which is – to be brutal – hatred of [director] Emir Kusturica. Underground is one of the most horrible films that I've seen. What kind of Yugoslav society do you see in Kusturica's Underground? A society where people fornicate, drink, fight – a kind of eternal orgy.
Emir Kusturica taught Film Directing at Columbia University's Graduate Film Division.
In 1998, he won the Venice Film Festival's Silver Lion for Best Direction for Black Cat, White Cat, a farcical comedy set in a Gypsy (Romani) settlement on the banks of the Danube. The music for the film was composed by the Belgrade-based band No Smoking Orchestra.
2000s
In 2001, Kusturica directed Super 8 Stories, a documentary road and concert movie about The No Smoking Orchestra, of which he is a band member. He was appointed President of the Jury of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. His film Maradona by Kusturica, a documentary on Argentine football star Diego Maradona, was released in Italy in May 2007. It premiered in France during the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. His film Promise Me This premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. In June 2007, Kusturica directed the music video to Manu Chao's single "Rainin in Paradize", from the latter's La Radiolina album.
In 2002 Kusturica became a UNICEF National Ambassador for Serbia.
Since January 2008 he has organized the annual private Küstendorf Film Festival. Its first installment was held at Drvengrad/Küstendorf, a village built for his film Life Is a Miracle, from 14 to 21 January 2008., PRESS, 14 December 2007 His next film, Cool Water, is a comedy set against the background of a Middle East conflict. Filming started in November 2010 in Germany.
2010s
Andrej Nikolaidis, a Montenegrin writer and columnist, criticized Kusturica for appearing to agree with Slobodan Milošević's propaganda during the Bosnian War. Kusturica sued Nikolaidis and the Monitor newspaper for civil damages at the Supreme Court of Montenegro. In the end, Nikolaidis was ordered to pay $6,490 to Kusturica for calling the famed director a "media star of Milosevic's war machinery". The judge ruled that the evidence was not credible enough.Il caso Kusturica, 23 February 2005 (in Italian) In the end Nikolaidis and the paper were fined 12,000 euros for breaking the code of journalism by calling Kusturica "stupid, ugly and corrupt" in the article.
In October 2010, Kusturica withdrew from the jury of Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival after being publicly criticized and accused by Turkish director Semih Kaplanoğlu and Turkey's minister of culture Ertuğrul Günay over his alleged remarks and opinions about the Bosnian War."Kusturica Quits Film Festival Jury in Turkey" , ABC News, Retrieved on 11 October 2010. The criticism of Kusturica was started by an organization called the Turkish-Bosnian Cultural Federation as soon as Kusturica was announced as a jury member.Kritike Kusturice u Turskoj ;Blic, 20 September 2010 Turkish media reported that Kusturica repeatedly downplayed the number of people killed and the rape of Muslim women during the war. The daily newspaper Milliyet said Kusturica denied the allegations. Public sentiment in Turkey and in Serbia was such that a couple of days after Kusturica left Turkey, there were unsubstantiated news reports by Serbian tabloids claiming that a mob of Turkish youths in Antalya physically assaulted Swiss actor Michael Neuenschwander (in town to promote his movie 180° – Wenn deine Welt plötzlich Kopf steht) because they mistook him for Kusturica due to apparent physical resemblances between the two.Prebijen glumac koji liči na slavnog reditelja – Kusta: Dobro je da sam otišao iz Turske ; Blic, 16 October 2010 Later, Neuenschwander's press agent said there was no physical assault and that Neuenschwander was verbally abused by a small group.Saldırıya uğramadı, sözlü tepki gördü ; Habertürk, 16 October 2010 Kusturica later commented on the incident:
At the 64th Cannes Film Festival, held 11–22 May 2011, Kusturica presided over the jury of the Un Certain Regard section of the festival's official selection. On 14 May, in Cannes, he was invested with the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, France's highest decoration."Emir Kusturica named Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur ". Festival de Cannes. 14 May 2011.
In September 2012, Kusturica accepted an offer to be the head juror of the first Saint Petersburg International Film Festival. During the festival he also performed for the residents and guests of Saint Petersburg with his band The No Smoking Orchestra.
Kusturica was awarded the Order of St. Sava, First Class, for his "selfless care and presentation of the Serbian nation in the world", on 12 May 2012.B92, Patrijarh odlikovao Kusturicu, 12 May 2012
During the last months of 2013, Kusturica started shooting a documentary on the life of Uruguayan president José Mujica, whom he considers "the last hero of politics". El Pepe: A Supreme Life was released in 2018.
2020s Kusturica announced that he will be filming his next project in Moscow. The film will be based on works of Russian writers Dostoyevski, Gogol and Tolstoy. It is titled Just One More Time. He was also planning to direct, in 2024, The Engineer of Easy Walks to be shot in Sochi.
Acting After numerous film cameo appearances over the years, Kusturica's first sizable acting role was in The Widow of St. Pierre, a 2000 movie by director Patrice Leconte, as a convict on the French island colony of Saint Pierre.
In 2002, Kusturica appeared as an electric guitar player/security specialist in The Good Thief, directed by Neil Jordan.
In the French movie L'affaire Farewell (2009), he played the role of a KGB agent, Colonel Sergei Gregoriev.
In On the Milky Road (2016), he played Kosta, a milkman and falconer.
Musical career
In mid-1986, thirty-one-year-old Kusturica started playing bass guitar in Zabranjeno Pušenje, a Sarajevan punk/garage rock outfit and part of the New Primitivism movement. Kusturica, an already established and celebrated Palm d'Or-winning film director, joined the band just after Zabranjeno Pušenje frontman Nele Karajlić had caused a media scandal that led to his legal prosecution on the verbal offence grounds and the band being shadow banned in the Yugoslav media, all of which hurt its commercial prospects and led to three of the six members leaving the group.
Kusturica ended up playing bass on three track from the band's third studio album Pozdrav iz zemlje Safari and composing one of the songs as well as directing a music video for the track "Manijak" off the album. Though never fully involved in the band's day-to-day activities, Kusturica left Zabranjeno Pušenje in 1988 once the filming of Time of the Gypsies began.