(U sedamnaest poglavlja, u sedamnaest autenticnih, uzbudlj...)
U sedamnaest poglavlja, u sedamnaest autenticnih, uzbudljivih, neverovartnih i provokativnih prica, proslavljeni srpski reziser Emir Kusturica, otvara porodicni album, ispisuje svoju biografiju i sjajno oslikava drugu polovinu 20. i prvu deceniju 21. veka. I autobiografija, i hronika, i svojevrsni film sastavljen od prica u kojima Kusturica, opisujuci i ljude i dogadjaje, ne stedi ni sebe, ni druge. Iskrena pripovest. Carolija od reci. Knjiga u kojoj pisac nista nije precutao. "Ideja da je smrt dovedena na nivo traca, odnosno tabloidne istine pocela je da korespondira sa idejom i pogledom unazad i broj ljudi iz djetinjstva kojih vise nema i recenicom moga oca, koju je izgovorio da bi me umirio kada sam kao jako mali vidio mrtvog covjeka, rekavsi - Smrt je sine, neprovjerena glasina", kazao je Kusta.
("Sto jada", novi naslov iz opusa novopecenog spisatelja K...)
"Sto jada", novi naslov iz opusa novopecenog spisatelja Kusturice, bar prema strucnim procenama knjizevnog znalca Manojla Vukotica, trebalo bi da bude jos jedno remek-delo u svim bolje opremljenim kioscima, zbirka pripovedaka dostupna srpskoj javnosti, vazda zeljnoj pisane reci i intelektualnog naprezanja. "Postoji izreka koja mi se dopada - 'Trista cuda, trista jada'", kazao je Kusturica pravdajuci naziv knjige "Sto jada" (gde se dedose preostalih 200?), upadljivo insistirajuci da se u njegovom okruzenju ona izgovara kad je nekome tesko, zbog cega bi neupuceni citalac trebalo da se sazali nad autorom i, u najmanju ruku, kupi ovaj uradak s Mokre gore. Da dobra knjiga ne mora nuzno biti i debela, bila je ideja vodilja ove knjizevne tezge, pa je Kusturica, izmedju dva avionska leta ka mrskom Zapadu ili dopadljivom Istoku uspeo da napabirci osam prica. Istina, autor je posebno naglasio, mada nije jasno iz kojih razloga, da je razmisljao i o devetoj prici koja je ipak izostala. "To je istinita prica o devojci koja je da bi pomogla ocu, zapalom u dugove, podigla kredit i snimila porno-film. Kada je otac u nekom motelu video taj film - ubio se. Nisam stigao da je zavrsim...", jedva je dovrsio recenicu vidno potreseni Kusturica.
Emir Nemanja Kusturica is a Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician, recognized for several internationally acclaimed feature films.
Since the mid-2000s, Kusturica's primary residence is Drvengrad, a village in the Mokra Gora region of Serbia. He had portions of the historic village reconstructed for his film Life is a Miracle.
Background
Emir Kusturica was born on 24 November 1954 in Sarajevo, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is the son of Murat Kusturica, a journalist employed at Sarajevo's Secretariat of Information, and Senka Numankadić, a court secretary. Emir grew up as the only child of a secular Serb non-observant Muslim family.
Education
Kusturica graduated from film school (FAMU) at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 1978.
Kusturica began his professional career as a television director on TV Sarajevo, helming the dramas Nevjeste dolaze (1978; The Brides Are Coming) and Bife Titanic (1979; Buffet Titanic), an adaptation of the short story by the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, whose works became a frequent source of inspiration for Kusturica.
Kusturica’s first motion picture, the family drama Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell?(Do You Remember Dolly Bell?), was released in 1981. The same year, at the age of 27, he became lecturer at the newly established Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, a job that he performed until 1988. He was also art director of Open Stage Obala (Otvorena scena Obala).
After a stint teaching at the Academy of Scenic Arts in Sarajevo, he accepted in 1990 an invitation from Miloš Forman to take over his post as a professor of movie directing at Columbia University's Graduate Film Division in New York. Three years later Kusturica directed his first English-language movie, Arizona Dream, a dramedy starring Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, and Jerry Lewis. His headstrong creative spirit did not fit well into the Hollywood mold, and at one point he left the production and moved to Serbia.
Already known for methodical work and long postproduction periods, Kusturica directed only two feature films over the next two decades: Život je čudo (2004; Life Is a Miracle) and Zavet (2007; Promise Me This). However, in this period he directed the well-received documentaries Priče super osmice (2001; Super 8 Stories), about his rock band, Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra, and Maradona (2008), about the Argentine football (soccer) player. In addition, Kusturica directed segments for two anthology movies, All the Invisible Children (2005) and Words with Gods (2014); he also appeared in the latter, which was commissioned by Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2016 he returned to directing feature films with Na mlečnom putu (“On the Milky Road”), in which he also starred, with Monica Bellucci.
As a musician, Kusturica performed and toured as a bass player with several rock bands and musicians, including his son, musician Stribor Kusturica, who composed sound tracks for several of his father’s movies.
In 2002 Kusturica began building sets for Life Is a Miracle on a hill in western Serbia. He continued to expand the sets, which eventually grew into an ethno-village that he named Drvengrad (“Woodville”). It opened to the public in 2012. In addition, in 2008 Kusturica founded his own international film and music festival, Küstendorf, which was held annually in Drvengrad.
He also published an autobiography Smrt je neprovjerena glasina (“Death Is an Unverified Rumour”) in 2010, followed by a book of fiction, Sto jada (“Hundreds of Troubles”), in 2013.
Kusturica currently acts as the president of the Ski Association of Serbia.
On St. George's Day in 2005, Kusturica was baptised into the Serbian Orthodox Church as Nemanja Kusturica in Savina monastery near Herceg Novi, Montenegro. To his critics who considered this the final betrayal of his Bosnian Muslim roots, he replied that: “My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were Orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks.“
Politics
At the 2007 parliamentary elections, he gave indirect support to Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and his center-right Democratic Party of Serbia. In 2007, he also supported the Serbian campaign Solidarity - Kosovo is Serbia, a campaign against the unilateral separation of the Serbian province of Kosovo.
Membership
The No Smoking Orchestra music band (Zabranjeno Pušenje)
1986 - 2018
Interests
Music & Bands
rock, bass guitar
Connections
Kusturica is married to Maja Mandić; the couple have two children: Stribor and Dunja.
Father:
Murat Kusturica
Mother:
Senka Numankadic
Spouse:
Maja Mandić
Daughter:
Dunja Kusturica
Son:
Stribor Kusturica
References
Emir Kusturica
With no less than two Golden Palms from Cannes and scores of other top awards, Bosnian-born Emir Kusturica is one of the most decorated and celebrated film directors in the world. Films such as Time of the Gypsies (1989) and Underground (1995) have captivated audiences with their extraordinary imagination, exuberant energy and challenging and often contentious subjectmatter. But Kusturica is also one of the most controversial directors working in cinema today. While many critics have praised his free-flying fantasy, others have found his films excessively exoticised and overdrawn. Some have publicly criticised his politics. He has an extensive international fan following who worship his work and think of him as a film-making genius, but there are also people who think of him as an opportunist. Dina Iordanova's study in the BFI World Directors series is a balanced examination of Kusturica's personality, films, artistry, and ideology. It acknowledges the contradictions but tries to understand and make them comprehensible to others. The text presents an overview of Kusturica's career from early films with their debt to Russian cinema and the Czech New Wave (Do you Remember Dolly Bell? 1981; When Father was Away on Business, 1985) to the most recent Black Cat White Cat (1998) and the 'rockumentary' Super 8 Story (2001). It pays tribute to his attractive and impressive aesthetics and investigates the particularities of his ideology. The author details Kusturica's artistic and personal roots dating back to socialist Sarejevo in the former Yugoslavia, examining the sources of his unique artistry, and the complex ideological and political issues that arise from their production and reception histories. Dina Iordanova's account presents a uniquely rounded view of this fascinating director showing how Kusturica's intensely held (though changing) Balkan affiliations lie at the root of a practice which has proved to be one of the latest and glorious flowerings of the European auteurist tradition.
2002
Emir Kusturica (Contemporary Film Directors)
Emir Kusturica is one of Eastern Europe's most celebrated and influential filmmakers. Over the course of a thirty-year career, Kusturica has navigated a series of geopolitical fault lines to produce subversive, playful, often satiric works. On the way he won acclaim and widespread popularity while showing a genius for adjusting his poetic pitch--shifting from romantic realist to controversial satirist to sentimental jester. Leading scholar-critic Giorgio Bertellini divides Kusturica's career into three stages--dissention, disconnection, and dissonance--to reflect both the historic and cultural changes going on around him and the changes his cinema has undergone. He uses Kusturica's Palme d'Or winning Underground (1995)--the famously inflammatory take on Yugoslav history after World War II--as the pivot between the tone of romantic, yet pungent critique of the director's early works and later journeys into Balkanist farce marked by slapstick and a self-conscious primitivism. Eschewing the one-sided polemics Kusturica's work often provokes, Bertellini employs balanced discussion and critical analysis to offer a fascinating and up-to-date consideration of a major figure in world cinema. Emir Kusturica is one of Eastern Europe's most celebrated and influential filmmakers. Over the course of a thirty-year career, Kusturica has navigated a series of geopolitical fault lines to produce subversive, playful, often satiric works. On the way he won acclaim and widespread popularity while showing a genius for adjusting his poetic pitch--shifting from romantic realist to controversial satirist to sentimental jester. Leading scholar-critic Giorgio Bertellini divides Kusturica's career into three stages--dissention, disconnection, and dissonance--to reflect both the historic and cultural changes going on around him and the changes his cinema has undergone. He uses Kusturica's Palme d'Or winning Underground (1995)--the famously inflammatory take on Yugoslav history after World War II--as the pivot between the tone of romantic, yet pungent critique of the director's early works and later journeys into Balkanist farce marked by slapstick and a self-conscious primitivism. Eschewing the one-sided polemics Kusturica's work often provokes, Bertellini employs balanced discussion and critical analysis to offer a fascinating and up-to-date consideration of a major figure in world cinema.