Meet Emir Kusturica

Written by Marco Dotti

After its big success in Serbia, Emir Kusturica’s autobiography  Smrt je neprovjerena glasina, Death is an Unverified Rumour, goes beyond its national borders and arrives  in Italy, where it has been published with a different title, Where I am in this story. We meet Emir Kusturica in Milan to talk about his book and the recent events in Libya, which are reminiscent of those that took place in Ex-Yugoslavia during the war, back in the nineties.

In your autobiography you write about how you were informed about the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1992. You were in France and when you switched on the TV you discovered about the collapse of your country from an enthusiastic anchorwoman who announced that Yugoslavia didn’t exist anymore.

The anchorwoman on television was smiling enthusiastically while giving the news, although obviously there wasn’t much to be enthusiastic about. The consequences of a country’s breakup are never happy. But we shouldn’t be surprised, we live in a world crowded with messengers who never announce anything important and when they do, they do not even realize it. I was living in America with my family at the time and we had just decided to move back to Yugoslavia but we didn’t have the chance because Yugoslavia was not there anymore.

History repeats itself and what happened in the Balkans doesn’t seem to have taught us anything. I’m referring to the situation in Libya .

We are so oblivious and intoxicated that we can barely remember when the release date of the new Ipad is. We don’t remember anything, we don’t desire anything and we’ve lost hope. Governments start wars and dare to call them humanitarian but this doesn’t change the reality of the facts, a war is still a war, death is still death and bombs are still bombs. Nowadays even intellectuals support wars in the name of human rights, but what kind of respect of human rights creates death and fear?

Let’s talk about the situation in Libya. What has changed since 1992?

Today it is easier to start a war, it’s not even necessary to declare it or to ask for UN resolution and if the resolution arrives nobody really cares, it’s a pure gesture of diplomatic snobbery. Whoever wants to start a war, can do so. Intellectuals might organize peace demonstrations or  concerts to raise funds but there is no real resistance, no real criticism and no passion. Can you imagine someone like John Lennon who talks to Sarkozy and Carla Bruni and doesn’t mention the war or in the best case scenario asks for some funds to plant a couple of trees in Africa? Where is Bono now? Where is Sting? Maybe they are in some Zen monastery, crying over some dying plants in the Amazon forest.  What I mean is that social and political engagement is a serious thing. The problem is that people like Bono, Sting and Obama do not change anything. They are just the example of how 1968 values have been sold to Wall Street.