The immense Kremlin table had already served as a place for discussions between Vladimir Putin and his French counterpart. The Russian president had put a lot of distance between himself and Emmanuel Macron during the latter’s visit to Moscow two years ago. On April 2, the master of the Kremlin did not stand so far from his guest. The leader and the filmmaker Emir Kusturica know each other, as the artist recalled at the start of the interview, in a video released by the Kremlin. The two men saw each other notably during Vladimir Putin’s trip to Belgrade in 2019, then at the Saint Petersburg Forum. During their meeting in Moscow, the director announced to the president that he wanted to make three films to glorify great Russian culture, based on works by Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy.
Above all, Emir Kusturica made a true declaration of love to Vladimir Putin, in bombastic Russian. “I want to thank you for your fair, personal and historical position, which among us Slavs has not always been so visible. What is happening today in Ukraine is a struggle for us. We who saw what happened with these Croatian Banderites when they expelled 230,000 Serbs. I think this analogy is very important for us“.
The director, a loyal supporter of Serbian nationalists
The filmmaker thus compared the Croatian separatists to the Ukrainians, the enemies of Serbia to those of Russia. It should be remembered that Emir Kusturica always supported Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, who died in the detention center of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague (Netherlands) in 2006, before might have been tried for war crimes, crimes once morest humanity and genocide.
The films of the filmmaker, crowned with two Palmes d’Or at Cannes “earned Emir Kusturica unreserved approval from a large part of French and European criticism, without any attention to his political positions”, protests Jean-Michel Frodon, teacher at Science Po Paris and film critic. Yet the artist “has supported pro-Serb extremist positions in former Yugoslavia for a long time. There is no question here of separating the man from the work. The latter carries messages of power, domination, virilism.”
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In 1995, Emir Kusturica won, with Underground, his second Palme d’Or at Cannes. Archives used in the film show Slovenian and Croatian crowds applauding the German occupier. The Serbs are portrayed as resistance fighters. In France, voices have been raised to assert that this is pro-Serbian propaganda, notably those of the philosophers Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard Henry Lévy. “Yes, there were pro-Nazis among the Croats, the Bosniaks, the Serbs, people who were afraid, who crashed. Yes, there were resistant Croats including Tito, resistant Serbs, resistant Bosniaks. But if we induce, even poetically and while drinking, in a popular, fun and Balkan way, that the enemies were linked to the Nazis, that’s propaganda“, explains anthropologist Véronique Nahoum Grappe.
The filmmaker was devastated by the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Emir Kusturica was born into a Bosnian Muslim family in Sarajevo. Then he converted to Orthodoxy in 2005. “He claimed that his family was Bosnian but that they were Serbian Orthodox before the Turks forced them to convert to Islam,” continues Véronique Nahoum-Grappe. “Emir Kusturica is pro-Milosevic because he believes that Bosnia is Serbian and Orthodox. This is the same position as that of Vladimir Putin who considers that Ukraine is not Ukrainian but Russian.“
The critic Jean-Michel Frodon, former journalist of Le Monde and former editorial director of Cahiers du cinéma, also explains the fascination that the filmmaker arouses with his “transgressive and anarchist posture. Emir Kusturica “claims his support for anti-globalization and Che Gevara. He has given concerts with his group No Smoking Orchestra, with this posture of an eternal libertarian rebel when in reality, he embodies the most authoritarian approaches. It is of a billionaire who builds a kind of Serbian amusement park blessed by the Orthodox patriarch.”
A “Disneyland of Serbian nationalism” in eastern Bosnia
This is the case in Visegrad, located in Republika Srpska, one of the two entities that make up Bosnia since the Dayton Accords (1995) ended the war. Emir Kusturica built a town within the town, Andricgrad, in homage to the Bosnian Nobel Prize winner for literature, Ivo Andric. According to Florence Hartmann, former journalist from Le Monde and former spokesperson for the ICTY prosecutor’s office, “executions took place at the exact location where this fake city was built, on the banks of the Drina, mainly in May and June 1992. Men were rounded up by militiaman Milan Lukic – who was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes once morest humanity and war crimes in 2009 – and his own, Radomir Susnjar who lived peacefully in Saint-Denis, in the Paris region, until his extradition in 2018. At the beginning of the summer. 1992, Visegrad, like the other towns of the Drina, was emptied of its Bosnian inhabitants. Thousands of men were killed in each of its towns, sometimes entire families, many women were raped.“.
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Hikmet Karcic, a Sarajevo political scientist and authority on the study of war crimes, explains that“in 1992, the Yugoslav army rounded up the Bosnian population on the spot. They separated the men from the women, there were executions. We are talking regarding a town where, today, the authorities do not allow the construction of monuments in tribute to the victims, such as at the Vilina Vlas hotel where 200 women and girls were raped. The objective of the construction is to show what Visegrad would have looked like if Muslims had never lived there. Many see it as a kind of Disneyland of Serbian nationalism, with murals of Vladimir Putin and Milorad Dodik.“.
Milorad Dodik, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, is considered Vladimir Putin’s man in Europe. The filmmaker and the ultranationalist leader have displayed their friendship for years. According to Florence Harmann, “Emir Kusturica is an active participant in the construction of a national narrative purified of all the crimes committed. The director of denial.