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March 4-5, 2017 theaustralian.com.au/reviewAUSE01Z01AR - V1

The 11-piece Serbian band will playWOMADelaide this month, but tonight thefocus is on Serbia. Serbian Minister of CultureVladan Vukosavljevic•has already made a shortspeech talking up the festival’s policy of creativeexchange between young directors and sea-soned moviemakers, along with its mission tohighlight local traditions and geography. Beam-ing at the minister’s elbow, 62-year-old Kusturi-ca — visionary, uncompromising, bullishlycontroversial — is a surprisingly avuncularpresence, wearing his national treasure status ascomfortably as he might a puffer jacket andchunky boots, Kustendorf’s outfit of choice.

There is no red carpet at this bijou week-longwingding. Previous years have seen the likes ofJohnny Depp, Audrey Tautou and Monica Bel-lucci — who features alongside Kusturica in hisnew film, On the Milky Road — mingling withinternational auteurs and fresh-faced repre-sentatives from the “new authors” category,whose short films vie for the festival’s mainprize, the Golden Egg.

Helming this year’s festival Jury is theaward-winning Chinese novelist and screen-writer Geling Yan, whose fragile beauty belies along stint in the People’s Liberation Army, andwho skilfully negotiates the village’s icy streets,variously named after Fellini, Bruce Lee andtennis champ Novak Djokovic.

“We have a good place here, far away fromsymbols of the civilised world,” says the bear-

like Kusturica the day after the concert, relax-ing in the Library, a basement hangout whosewalls are stocked with novels and referencebooks and bottles of Kustendorf’s organic wine.“I used my authority with the government tobring roads, canals and electricity to the moun-tain. There was nothing when I first came ex-cept a haystack destroyed by [a storm].”

Boasting a film school, an Orthodox church,basketball courts (a tribute to the three worldchampionships won by the former Yugoslavia),a wellness centre with swimming pool and evenan attendant ski slope, the hilltop retreat is opento guests all year around. Fans from as far awayas Canada, Japan and Morocco make pilgrim-ages to Kustendorf (which is also called Drven-grad or ‘‘wooden town’’) in the hope of meetingtheir idol, one of the most celebrated film-makers in Europe and a man regarded by manyas a sort of Serbian Tarantino.

Kusturica has a pied-a-terre in the Serbiancapital of Belgrade, though he rarely stays there.But when not making movies, overseeing thebuilding of another village in the nearby Serbi-an Republic of Bosnia (Andricgrad, after Nobelprize-winning writer Ivo Andric), or touring theworld with the NSO (more of which in a mo-ment), he and his wife Maja Mandic live in Kus-tendorf, in a two-storey house with a helipad,single railing fence and wandering gaggle ofsnowy white geese.

Built for his 2004 film Life is a Miracle, and

Emir Kusturica performing with the No Smoking Orchestra, left and right; Kusturica at the 10th Kustendorf International Film and Music Festival, below; with actress Monica Bellucci in his new film On the Milky Road, far right

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It’s the opening concert of the 10th Kusten-dorf International Film and Music Festivalin Serbia, and founder-director Emir Kus-turica has sticks of gold confetti in his longgrey fringe and an electric guitar strapped

across his uncharacteristic black tuxedo. Fivesimilarly besuited musicians on instruments in-cluding fiddle, accordion and tuba are seatedaround him, performing some of the tunes theyhave played on every Kusturica movie sound-track since his acclaimed 1999 screwball com-edy Black Cat, White Cat.

The band’s name is the No Smoking Orches-tra and it is fronted by the outspoken Kusturica,who is also a two-time Palme d’Or-winning in-dependent filmmaker. And tonight the orches-tra’s turbocharged gumbo of gypsy swing,Serbian rock, Slavic folk and Greek and Jewishwedding music — a sound labelled ‘‘unza unza’’— is being played straight and sedate, in collab-oration with a big band from the Serbian city ofNovi Sad. The threat of musical anarchy, how-ever, is never far away.

‘‘And God said, ‘Oh my God! What’s hap-pened to the human being / Wake up crowd /Wake up from your boring dream,’’ run the lyr-ics of Unza Unza Time, the No Smoking Orches-tra’s frenetic 2000 hit; which, like most of itsEnglish/Serbian repertoire, has a left-field, anti-globalist aesthetic.

A capacity audience in the Noam ChomskyTheatre in Kustendorf, the wooden village Kus-turica built on a mountainside in western Ser-bia, applauds warmly after each track. This isn’tyour usual mile-a-minute NSO gig, in whichbare-chested band members in cowboy hatspogo and crowd-surf, and sweaty fans mosh andstorm the stage. ‘‘This is dance music that onecannot resist because no two feet remain calmwhen it plays,’’ trumpets the band’s biography.

set amid some 11,000ha, the village is a workingmodel of what Kusturica calls ‘‘new communal-ism’’. It’s a political ideology he insists offers realfreedom — as opposed to the restrictive liber-ties drip-fed by an anxious, corporate-con-trolled West.

“We have investments. We are ecologicallyand culturally protected. We pushed out a Brit-ish company who wanted to mine the nickelhere and made this area national park,” he says.Out there are deer, lynx and bears; On the MilkyRoad sees his character feeding wedges of or-ange to a bear from his mouth. “We are out ofrange from the new colonialists who would im-pose their bad infrastructure.”

He has said he lost his city, Sarajevo, thecapital of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the war, and after stints in Parisand New York wanted somewhere to belong(he was last in Sarajevo in 1992). His decision tolive in and identify with Serbia was seen astraitorous by many Bosnians, especially sinceKusturica, who is descended from a long line ofBosnian Muslims (and before that, OrthodoxChristian Serbs), rarely speaks out againstSlobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader whoravaged his homeland.

Kusturica’s metaphor-packed, parable-likefilms suggest an acute awareness of the contra-dictions of Yugoslavia’s troubled history. He hasalways insisted he didn’t choose sides: “Just be-cause I believe in the identity and integrity ofmy country doesn’t make [me] a xenophobe or anationalist,” he told Britain’s Daily Telegraph.He once challenged ultranationalist Serbianpolitician Vojislav Seselj to a duel in Belgrade;Seselj refused, stating he would not be responsi-ble for the death of a naive artist.

“Do you see that line down there?” Kusturicapoints towards the beautiful, snow-dustedMokra Gora valley spreading out below us.Somewhere amid the pine forests is the frontierof the Bosnian Serb portion of Bosnia.

“War is frequent in our area, which makes usa very tragic nation. As Andric says in his im-portant book, The Bridge on the Drina [whichKusturica is adapting for the screen], wars neversolve the problems that started them, but theyopen new chapters and ask new questions thatwe have to answer in a new conflict.

“Anyway, when I finished shooting Life is aMiracle” — in which a Serbian engineer falls forhis Bosnian Muslim hostage — “we built a townfor the people, with no borders and no preju-dice. A protest against this idiocracy [sic] of themass product, which is the sign and the symbolof all the world today.”

WHERE THERE’S SMOKEThe threat of musical anarchy won’t be far away when visionary musician and filmmaker Emir Kusturica and his band take the stage in Adelaide, writes Jane Cornwell

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