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http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/culturehousedaily/2015/02/emir-kusturica-interview-why-slavoj-zizek-is-a-fraud/

Emir Kusturica interview: why Slavoj iek is a fraud

Digby WardeAldam

Emir Kusturica in Andrigrad

Last month I was invited on a press trip to Serbia. The whole thing sounded great; free accommodation, free food,
free travel. I said yes, obviously. But there was a catch; it involved an interview with the film director Emir
Kusturica.
Now, the first thing you should know about Emir Kusturica is that hes huge, a proper man-mountain. His hands
look like they could do more damage than your average battle tank, and at 63, he must be at least a head taller
than me. Not that Im thinking this lucidly when finally the interview moment comes. Before I begin my questions,
Im more than a little scared that, at any moment, he might grab my throat and make himself two heads taller than
me.
Because the second thing you should know about Emil Kusturica is that he is, to put it mildly, a volatile character.
The third thing, which concerns me more than it does you, is that he is glaring at me and the two other
interviewers in a terrifying way.
He has granted this group interview to promote his film festival, an annual booze-up on the mountainous border
between Serbia and Bosnia. Its about as far from a red carpet affair as you get. There are no tickets, and no clear
aim at making a profit. The point is, he insists, to draw attention to young film-makers who otherwise wouldnt have
a chance to get their work shown.

A bit of light entertainment at the2015 Kstendorf Film Festival

But aside from those in competition for prizes, I dont think many people are here to watch films. No, the draw is
the place, and by extension Kusturica himself. Because Kstendorf a hamlet of comically cute wooden houses
is entirely Kusturicas creation.
Kusturica is best known over here as the auteur behind the Palme dOr-winning films When Father was away on
Business (1985) and Underground (1995). His early work is tremendous; an operatically weird blend of magic
realism, punk aesthetics and Yugoslav history.
But after Underground was released, his critical standing took a nosedive. Commentators including Bernard-Henri
Lvy and Slavoj iek slammed him for a perceived bias towards ethnic Serbs in the Yugoslavian civil war, and to
cut a long story short, hes been voicing his antipathy towards the west ever since. Its little surprise, then, that his
films now attract much less attention than his behaviour.
He has slowed down his film-making in favour of touring with his band, writing books and acting. And now, he has
turned his hand to town planning. When looking for locations for his 2004 film Life is a Miracle, he wanted an
idealised Serb village. But no existing town suited so he built one himself. After shooting finished, he kept
building until he had a town complete with restaurants, bars and a cinema. Kstendorf, as he named it, is frankly
bizarre. Think Poundbury, Balkan-style.

Kstendorf, Serbia

But he didnt stop there. Last year, he unveiled Andrigrad, his newer, bigger and even weirder project just over
the border in Bosnia. This walled complex is essentially Saint Petersburg meets Bicester Village, as imagined by a
Saudi property developer.
Walking us around the town, Kusturica explains his masterplan. There are already cafs, restaurants, a cinema
and a bookshop. But all this is just phase one. Later this year, he plans to open the Serb answer to the Goethe
Institute a university dedicated to film making and, as he puts it, taking another angle on Balkan history.
Kusturicas version of history is starkly different from ours. He is (Im pretty sure, wrongly) convinced that the
revisionist west blames Serbia for starting the first world war. He argues that Kosovo was brutally cut off from
Serbia by NATO. And he has stressed that Serbs were not the only nationality to have committed atrocities during
the civil war.
Born to a non-observant Muslim family in Sarajevo, he has been accused of abandoning his Bosniak roots.
Consequently, his name is by all accounts dirt in his native city these days, and Andrigrads location is like a red
flag to those who see him as a Serb nationalist. It takes up a good chunk of Viegrad, the town where Ratko
Mladics paramilitaries massacred upwards of 3,000 Muslims in 1993.

Andricgrad, Bosnia

But for all his provocative gestures, I dont think hes prejudiced. He has a (perhaps justifiable) complex that
Serbia is still perceived as the bogeyman of Europe, and mourns the loss of pan-national multiculturalism and
open-mindedness in the former Yugoslavia. In short, he believes the disintegration of the communist state was one
of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.
He is not alone. At Belgrade airport I got picked up by a driver who set the tone of conversation for the next few
days: It is not much beauty here. Very desperate country. Very poor people. Things better in socialist times.
Virtually every English-speaking, educated Serb I speak to talks of little else but history and politics. And the
leitmotif of this is an overwhelming nostalgia for Yugoslavia. People talk about socialist times as heaven on earth.
One girl I speak to, a former politics student, tells me this: Things were good with communism. You could have
anything. All you traded was the right to think. I asked whether she would trade it back. Of course she would, she
said. She was tired of thinking.

Kusturica drinking

I somehow doubt Kusturica would make a similar trade-off. He is annoyed at what he sees as Serbias antipathy,
he tells us. Locals are reluctant to get behind his construction projects; the people, he claims, conform to an
Ottoman-era saying that it is better to sit for free than to work for free. As for his many critics from outside, he can
only sneer. Before the war, majority of the population were Muslims. Now they are, um, not. Now we [build
Andrigrad] and the elites they say this is the triumph of genocide or something ridiculous.
He warns that this political correctness will bring down European civilisation. Part of this he attributes to the EU, of
which he is no fan. It is a non-existent entity, he says, to me, it is just Germany feeling it must control the rest of
Europe.
I want to ask him whether he feels the controversy surrounding Underground ruined his career. But before I can
finish the question, he crushes his hand into a fist and shakes. I close my eyes, waiting for the blow.
Oofff, IEK! he roars. iek comes from Slovenia, a country with no philosophical tradition. This is evidence, in
his eyes, of political correctness gone mad. iek, according to Kusturica, is only popular due to his YouTubefriendly rants. This is what you need in the west, always somebody modern but there is nothing underneath.
Besides, hes got be a crank, insists Kusturica, he says my movie is the worst movie ever made on the planet!
How can [my films] be the worst in the world when there are Bernard-Henri Lvys movies? Even if I accept my
movies are the worst movies in the world, there is Bernard-Henri Lvy, who is for sure worse. I laugh in
agreement. Emir Kusturica laughs too. And, crucially, he does not rip my head off.
Tags: Bernard-Henri Lvy, Bosnia, Bosnian war, Cannes, chinatown, Emir Kusturica, EU, Film, film festival, Ratko
Mladic, Sarajevo, Serbia, Slavoj Ziek, Yugoslavia