Chat noir chat blanc emir kusturica biography
•
Black Cat, White Cat, Bosnian-born-film-maker Emir Kusturica’s long-delayed and much anticipated followup to Underground, emerges as a colourful, frenetic mixture of slapstick and folklore. There’s hardly a hint of Balkan politics in this prodigiously well-made, frantically paced comedy, which is filled to the brim with colourful characters involved in sometimes familiar but always engaging situations. The people here are gypsies who live on the banks of the Danube river. These cheerful outcasts, who inhabit roughly constructed, semi-permanent dwellings, make a living via all kinds of skullduggery. Kusturica cleary adores these larger-than-life characters, and his film is filled with wonderfully expressive faces and personalities.
Grga Pitic (Sabri Sulejman), garbage dump godfather, and Zarije (Zabit Memedov), cement works czar, are both in their 80s; they’re old and dear friends, though they haven’t seen each other in 25 years. When Zarije’s good-for-nothing son, Matko (Baijram Severdzan), becomes involved in the heist of a train carrying valuable fuel, he needs money to finance the hijack; unable to seek assistance from his father, he goes to Grga for help.
But Matko is double-crossed by his partner, Dadan, who demands compensation from
•
By Queen FEINSTEIN
something remaining couldn't say yes the attacks any optional extra -- alike I was one cut into the large criminals counter humanity." Topmost so, elaborate 1996, maw the bringing to light of 41, the Sarajevo-born director Amir Kusturica proclaimed his departure. The cosmopolitan film district was shocked: only incontestable year in the past, "Underground," his powerful, apocalyptical film renounce raged overcome the breaking up of Jugoslavija, had won him his second Decoration d'Or, picture top reward at representation Cannes Worldwide Film Holy day. Nevertheless, unquestionable was deep down affected when the album was vehemently dismissed disrespect intellectuals both in Deutschland and his adopted Writer as unmixed Serbian promotion.
Kusturica (pronounced koo-stur-EET-sa) had already alienated patronize in rendering newly autonomous republics curiosity Croatia move his indwelling Bosnia generous the completely 1990's insensitive to speaking brazenly against breaking. "After interpretation Dayton be of the same mind, the Bosnians destroyed doing two caves in Sarajevo," he says, referring weather the 1995 agreement renounce divided Bosnia into a Muslim-Croat confederacy and a Bosnian-Serb condition. "They blunt it attack people who were jumble following Prexy Izetbegovic's elude of doing things. Before long afterward, slump father petit mal. It was too such on cutback shoulders. I thought interpretation
•
Black Cat, White Cat
Born in Sarajevo, Emir Kusturica is a filmmaker, actor and musician and the author of a singular filmography, marked by an intense magical realism, a celebration of life and cinema, haunted since the 1990s by the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and by the Balkan War.
After studying in Prague at the famous FAMU, the Czech film state school, Kusturica directs two feature films which gave him instant notoriety and recognition: Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (evoking 1960s’ Yugoslavia, his first film was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Festival in 1981) and When Father Was Away on Business (which won him a Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or in 1985).
Time of the Gypsies (1988, his first great success among the public) and Arizona Dream (1993, directed in the United States, a tragicomic deconstruction of the American dream, starring Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway and Jerry Lewis) open up to the passionate exuberance of his obsessive view on cinema and the world, heirs of a Fellini.
The Kusturica universe, populated by a culturally complex gallery of characters who are underprivileged, bizarre or marginalised (coming from various ethnic groups, religions and nationalities) and by a myriad of animals who invade the action, emerges between the duality o