Yugoslav Directors (and from other countries...)


The style of Emir Kusturica can be found elsewhere among other directors, in other films. Sometimes the connection is voluntary, or sometimes I simply wanted to quote films that made me think to Emir.


Danis Tanović


No Man's Land is a bosnian film which had the Palm of the best scenario at the 2001 Cannes festival. The history is indeed very simple. It shows the nonsense of the war in ex-Yugoslavia in its most tragi-comic consequences. Two men (a Serb and a bosnian) both mutilated, face to face, in a trench. The flag is not far, the blue helmets and the journalists either. In this film, Danis did everything, the scenario, the cut, the direction and the music. And this is his first film, so ... bravo !
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After having won the Oscar fo the best foreign film in 2002, Danis Tanović is jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 2003.

Abdulah Sidran, about Danis Tanović, in an interview posted by Le courrier des Balkans in april 2002 : "Even if nothing comes after Danis, it is incontestably the eruption of a talent of our people. Danis did not fall from the sky. He is a child of this land, son of Mevludin and Hatidza Tanović. Director Ademir Kenović was his professor at the Academy of Sarajevo. I also made a conference to people of this generation, but I didn't remember their faces. I spoke to them about my cinematographic experiments. Danis remembers it very well : an evening, on federal television, he said to me : "Father Sidran, I always remember the sentence that you pronounced at the time of your conference to the Academy : ' the detail is God' ". However, nothing comes by chance. We lived a tragedy, but the gift granted to Bosnia could just as easily have been expressed in the mouth of another young person than Tanović. He frequently recognizes it during various talks. I see there a touch of providence and divine justice. It happens sometimes that the rewards are granted to people who reconciled talent and morals. The Oscar given to Tanović moved me, because it is such a long time that I observe the behavior of a number of our fellow-citizens. Most of them forgot the Masters who teached them how to read and write. As my memory is good, especially when there are negative examples, I remember that the bosnian cinema lost the greatest director this area never produced, but such was the will of God. The metaphysical force of these people generated a new talent, equal to the genius. That makes us happy, encourages us to thank Danis Tanović, nature and God, to have organized everything, to make us believe in justice in this world. "

The complete interview (in French)


Goran Paskaljević


Bure Baruta (Cabaret Balkan) released in 1998, with a casting close to Underground. The 4 main actors indeed are present : Miki Manojlović, Lazar Ristovski (Blacky), Mirjana Joković (Natalja), Mirjana Karanović (Vera) and Deda (Danilo ' Bata' Stojković) who cheats with the time. The similarities do not stop there since the assistant director is Zoran Andrić, the one of Emir Kusturica for Underground and Black Cat White Cat. There is even a scene where a young couple runs and dances in the street followed by... a gypsy brass band which plays traditional tunes that one also finds in Underground. Finally, it is an unequal film, with long moments, many characters, but the film is built on a series of psychological "duets" which finish often rather badly (i.e. in brawl, slaughter, etc), but the result is rather interesting...

Goran Paskaljević had a career which evolved almost in parallel with that of Emir Kusturica. Born in 1947 in Belgrade, he also studied at the prestigious school of Prague the FAMU. Revolted like Emir by gypsies children drafts in 1985, his film Guardian Angel will be released two years before Emir's. In 1995, Goran Paskaljević tries to show his vision of America with Someone else's America. His last film, released in 2001, is called How Harry became a tree. Even if they are less billant than those of Emir Kusturica, his films are rich and deserve more than a glance. But warning : don't offend him by asking questions comparing him with Emir Kusturica... It annoys him quickly! See this interview done in 2001 :

  • In Someone else's America, for example, are the levitation scene an homage or a response to Kusturica ?
    • Goran Paskaljević : Do you think Kusturica has invented the flying people ?
  • No, not at all, but we can have the impression that your film is a response to Kusturica's Arizona Dream which proposed "his" vision of the USA.
    • But, do you think I can make a film as a response to another film ?
  • No, but maybe inconsciously...
    • Kusturica is not an author who has marked me much. Perhaps I have even influenced him. I am older, he made his film on the gypsies two years after mine, taking the same topic, but as in France he is well-known, they say I am his disciple ! Which is completely absurd ! It is like if you said that Melville is the disciple of Kassovitz because Kassovitz is more well-known !
      I do not have anything against Kusturica, but the end of Someone else's America is firstly an homage to the end of Sica's Miracle in Milan. But there are also levitations in Tarkovski's The Mirror...

official site : www.paskaljevic.com


Goran Marković


Tito and me was directed by Goran Marković in 1991 during the Serbo-croatian war. One could think that it is about an horrible drama. But not. The hero is Zoran, a very greedy kid and rather fat. His occupations, in 1954, are divided between his love for a girl orphan of war and his fascination for Tito. He will be brought to take part in "the walk of the children to the native land of Tito" which will be enclosed by a reception at the dictator. But, for Zoran, these rejoicings will just be one long continuation of disappointments : his beloved girlfriend prefers a goof and at the entry of the house of Marshal Tito lies a gigantic shit... A small masterpiece of funny and caustic irony.

In this film appear Miki Manojlović and Lazar Ristovski.

Goran Marković is a great name of yugoslav cinema. Born july 24, 1946 in Belgrade, he also directed Tragédie Burlesque (from a scenario of Dušan Kovačević, the author of Underground), Serbie année zéro (documentary) mor recently Kordon.
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Enki Bilal


Enki (diminutive of Enes) Bilal is born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia on October 7 1951, six years after the end of the war, with a Yougoslav father and a Czech mother, his father being the former tailor of Marshal Tito. He spends ten years of his life in Belgrade before exiling with his parents in France, in Paris.

In 1971, he enters Pilote for illustrations (caricatures of politicians). He will there meet Christin, with whom he will collaborate many years for strips which will be enormous success like Les Phallanges de l'Ordre Noir, then it is in solo that he will affirm his style with albums like La femme piège, La Foire aux Immortels and Froid Equateur (better book of year 1993 by magazine LIRE, all genre confused, a first in the history of comic strip).

Then Enki Bilal directs his first film, Bunker palace hotel, in 1989 with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Carole Bouquet. It seems clear that Emir Kusturica saw this film, and that it marked (influenced ?) him for the esthetics and the topics of Underground. In both films indeed, some people are kept in an underground cellar without possibility of leaving, without news of the external world, besides those which are given by an obscure manipulator...

1997. Release of Bilal's second film : Tykho moon, co-written by Dan Frank. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays again, accompanied by Julie Delpy, Joseph Leysen, Michel Picolli and Richard Bohringer.
Among his collaborations to the cinema, we can also mention his work on the set of Life is a bed of roses by Alain Resnais, and The name of the Rose by Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Decembre 32nd, following The Dormant Beast is just released. These two albums occur in an close future, with themes such as religious obscurantism, modern art, human cloning and always in bond with ex-Yugoslavia. The history is sumptuous and complex, and one can say that Enki put his own portrait on Nike (anagram of Enki) Hatzfeld, born in Sarajevo during the bombardments from his city in 1993.

On March 24th, Enki Bilal releases his third full-length film : Immortel (ad vitam), based on the Nikopol trilogy, mixing synthesized images, real actors and mate-paintings. The film is incredible, and at least the technique allowed Enki to put all his universe on a 35 mm film. Immortal (ad vitam) can be ordered on Amazon.fr as a collector double DVD edition.

Enki Bilal books available on Amazon.com :


A mini-site of Enki Bilal on fnac.net (in French) : www.fnac.net/bilal


Tony Gatlif


Gadjo Dilo (The crazy stranger)is the third of a gypsy trilogy started with the Princes, about sedentarized gypsies, followed by Latcho Drom, with the road of the gypsy music from Rajasthan to Andalusia. Algerian gypsy born in 1948, Tony Gatlif made other films (Pleure pas my love, Gaspard et Robinson, Vengo) which are "only movies. The three gypsy films, it is something else. A mission."

Stéphane (Romain Duris), a young French musicologist, has a personnal quest : to find the woman who sings on a cassette of his father. Lost on the frozen roads of Transylvania, he meets Izidor, an old odd man, who takes him along in his village. Shock of the cultures. During weeks spent to record various musical sets, Stéphane falls in love with beautiful Sabina (Rona Hartner), and becomes a gypsy.

Fiction strongly anchored in reality since the majority of the characters hold their own role. With heat, with love, with great musics, Tony Gatlif makes us share the intimacy of a proud and miserable people. He slips from laugh to tears, he covers all the human feelings, honest obscenity and tearing mourning. He orchestrates moments of pure cinematographic magic : like, thanks to a home made grammophone, Izidor hears the voice of his father who sleeping for decades on a wax disc fixed on the wall...

In Latcho Drom one finds the same brillant singer Suva Devi of Time of the gypsies.

Tony Gatlif movies available on Amazon.com :


Pavel Lungin


The wedding of Pavel Lungin

In a small mining village near Moscow the wedding of Michka and Tania is being prepared. Tania, Michka's child love, is back from Moscow. In the family of Michka, this wedding does not delight anybody. The father, hero of the village, sees all the guests he'll have to feed. The grandfather sees, him,with an evil eye "this creature" entering the family and the mother cries for the fate of her son. But the wedding starts, without money, maybe without bride... A true spectacle where all is possible, whereas worst or best, where the limits vanish, where the drama is as close as happiness.

Pavel Lungin : "This project was born from questions which torment me and for which I have no answers. How does the Russian people survive in year 2000 ? I do not speak about great misfortunes : war, the Maffia or the corruption, but about the everyday life. What became the family, love, childhood, friendship ? Did people change ? Can they change ? I've desired to paint through situations sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, the collective portrait of a mining provincial town, that of Lipki, a small borough 200 kilometers from Moscow. There, the time seems to be stopped : socialism era is over and the new life hasn't started yet. The main actors are surrounded by the inhabitants of Lipki, images of these people forgotten by their government, the artists and the whole world. These million Russians lost in the middle of their country. The main character of film, Michka, is ingenuous, "idiotic" in the sense of Dostoïevski, someone for whom sacrifice is as natural as breathing. In Russia, a proverb says : "Without a right man, a village cannot exist." This is the key sentence of this film, because as long as in Russia the force and the kindness of people like Michka will remain, this country will always have forces. "

Officiel site : www.pyramidefilms.com/lanoce

April 2003, Pavel Lungin makes a new chronicle on the oligarchs of today's Russia, with A New Russian.

Pavel Lungin movies available on Amazon.com :


Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov


Luna Papa of Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov

In a small village near Samarkand (Uzbekistan), Mamlakat a seventeen year old girl dreams to become an actress. One night of full moon, she is seduced by a mysterious foreigner who claims to be a friend of Tom Cruise. Then he disappears, leaving Mamlakat pregnant. For her father Safar and her brother Nasreddin (brain damaged) restore the honor of family is a question of pride. They decide to seek the father. From inside the uterus, Khabibulla, who was conceived this miraculous night, gives comments on the incredible adventures and odd misfortunes that arrive to the three characters seeking the father. LUNA PAPA is a fantastic trip from the wild horizons of the Central Asia where tradition and superstition are confronted with the chaos of the post-modern world.

On April 30 is released in France Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov's new film : The Costume.