1.
Underground (1995)
This comedy war drama film revolves around Marko and Blacky, who manufacture and sell weapons to the Communist resistance in Belgrade during the time of the Second World War.
Now well-recognized as a world-class director, Emir Kusturica started out as an actor at the age of 16 when he played a small role as a young communist activist in the Yugoslav partisan film ‘Walter Defends Sarajevo’ (‘Valter brani Sarajevo’), directed by his father’s friend Hajrudin Krvavac. Two years later, he made his television debut reprising the same role in an episode of the television adaptation of the film. He had made several short films during his high school years, and while attending the prestigious Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, he earned various awards and accolades for his short films, most notably ‘Guernica’ (1978), which received the best short film award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Following graduation, he began his professional career as a television director on TV Sarajevo with drama films like ‘Nevjeste dolaze’ (‘The Brides Are Coming’) (1978) and ‘Bife Titanic’ (‘Buffet Titanic’) (1979), the first of which gained notoriety for its explicit scenes.
Emir Kusturica made his feature film debut with the 1981 coming-of-age drama ‘Sjecas li se, Dolly Bell?’ (‘Do You Remember Dolly Bell?’), which won the prestigious Silver Lion for Best First Work award at the Venice Film Festival that year. Following another TV film, ‘Nije covjek ko ne umre’ (1984), he directed his second feature film, the political drama ‘Otac na sluzbenom putu’ (‘When Father Was Away on Business’) (1985), which earned him the Palme d'Or, the highest award at the Cannes Film Festival, and five Yugoslav movie awards, apart from a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. His next directorial, his surrealist depiction of the exploitation of the Romani (Gypsy) youth in ‘Dom za vesanje’ (‘Time of the Gypsies’) (1989), earned him further acclaim including the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, he directed a five-part Yugoslav television series based on his latest film.
In 1993, while teaching Film Directing at Columbia University's Graduate Film Division in the United States, Emir Kusturica made his first English language film, the absurdist comedy ‘Arizona Dream’, starring Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, and Jerry Lewis, for which he won a Silver Bear award for direction at the Berlin International Film Festival. He joined a small group of directors to win a second Palme d'Or with his 1995 black comedy epic ‘Podzemlje’ (‘Underground’), which was a parable on the breakup of Yugoslavia. The long cut of the movie stretching to 300 minutes was shown on Serbian RTS television as a five-part mini-series under the title ‘Once Upon a Time There Was One Country’, which was also the subtitle of the original film. In 1998, he made another film set in a Gypsy settlement, the farcical comedy ‘Crna macka, beli macor’ (‘Black Cat, White Cat’), which earned him the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival.
Emir Kusturica started the new century directing a documentary on his music band, The No Smoking Orchestra, titled ‘Super 8 Stories’, in 2001. His first feature film of the decade was the Serbian drama film ‘Zivot je cudo’ (‘Life Is a Miracle’) (2004), which was nominated at the Cannes Film Festival for Palme d'Or and won several international accolades including the César Award. It was again made into a 5-hour-long miniseries for television in 2006. In 2005, he directed the segment "Blue Gypsy" in the anthology drama ‘All the Invisible Children’, a collection of seven short stories by seven directors depicting childhood problems. His next film was the 2007 romantic comedy ‘Zavet’ (‘Promise Me This’), which was again nominated for the Palme d'Or. The next year, he directed ‘Maradona by Kusturica’, a documentary on the life of Argentine footballer Diego Maradona. In 2014, he was one of nine directors filming separate segments for the Mexican-U.S. anthology film ‘Words with Gods’, which captured each director’s individual relationship with the God. He later expanded his segment, “Our Life”, into the 2016 feature film ‘On the Milky Road’, which earned him the Little Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival. His final film so far has been the 2018 documentary ‘El Pepe: A Supreme Life’, about the life and legacy of Uruguay's last president José ‘Pepe’ Mujica.
While Emir Kusturica made several small, often uncredited appearances in his films and films by other directors over the years, his first significant role was as a convict on the French island colony of Saint Pierre in director Patrice Leconte’s French-Canadian film ‘The Widow of St. Pierre’ in 2000. Two years later, he appeared as an electric guitar player and security specialist in the British-French crime comedy film ‘The Good Thief’ by Neil Jordan. He played the role of KGB agent Colonel Sergei Gregoriev in Christian Carion’s French espionage thriller film ‘L'affaire Farewell’ (‘Farewell’) (2009). In 2016, he starred alongside Italian actress Monica Bellucci in his own film ‘On the Milky Road’, playing Kosta, a milkman and falconer.
