Emir Kusturica (Serbian Cyrillic: Емир Кустурица, pronounced [ě.mir ˈku.stu.ri.tsa]; 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.
Kusturica was born in Sarajevo, the son of Murat Kusturica, a journalist employed at Sarajevo's Secretariat of Information, and Senka (née Numankadić), a court secretary. Emir grew up as the only child of a Muslim secular family 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.
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.
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 Palme d'Or 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.
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. 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.
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. His next film, Cool Water, is a comedy set against the background of a Middle East conflict. Filming started in November 2010 in Germany.
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. 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. 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. 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. Later, Neuenschwander's press agent said there was no physical assault and that Neuenschwander was verbally abused by a small group. Kusturica later commented on the incident: