One is prone to oblivion and in the course of time the technique of forgetting turns into a crucial human capacity.
That is how the great Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s autobiography begins. Seventeen chapters of seventeen peculiar, authentic, provocative and before all else very sincere stories – the director flicks through the family album from the earliest days of his childhood; he describes the road of his personal and creative life on the background of the troubled years during the second half of XX and the beginning of XXI century. It is a book – an autobiography, a saga-novel and an unusual “film” at the same time. The author tells a number of stories sparing neither himself nor the others. He does not keep silent about anything.
Emir Nemanja Kusturica was born on 24 November 1954 in Sarajevo, main town of current Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician, recognized for several internationally acclaimed feature films. Even though Bosnian Muslim, his family has Slavic orthodox roots.
Kusturica is a two-time winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes (for “When Father Was Away on Business” and “Underground”), as well as being a Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters). His American debut is the popular absurdist comedy “Arizona Dream”(1993). 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 Romany settlement on the banks of the Danube.
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”.
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