Emir Kusturica: My Purpose Is to Make a Movie to Make You Warm

Emir Kusturica is a laureate of numerous prestigious film awards. He has won five awards at Cannes, including two Palme d’Or awards. Kusturica has been honored with awards at international film festivals in San-Paolo (1982), Berlin (1993), Chicago (2001), Copenhagen (2005), Sophia (2005), Warsaw (1994) and Moscow (2004). He also won the Cesar Award in 2005.
Above: Film director Emir Kusturica in Cannes, 2005.

Kusturica’s movie Time of the Gypsies (Dom za vešanje) is an ethnographic story about the contemporary life of gypsies in the Balkans. At the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, Kusturica won the Best Director Award and the film was nominated for a Palme d’Or. It is widely considered to be one of Kusturica’s best films.
Above: Emir Kusturica during the filming of "Time of Roma", 1988.

Life Is a Miracle (2004), addressing the topic of the Balkan war, was the first of Kusturica’s films to have won no awards at the Cannes film festival. To shoot the film, the director built a traditional village named Drvengrad (aka Küstendorf), 200 kilometers southwest of Serbia’s capital Belgrade. "I lost my city [Sarajevo] during the war. That is why I wished to build my own village. It is the place where I will live and where some people will be able to come from time to time," Kusturica said.

At the 64th Cannes Film Festival in 2011, Kusturica presided over the jury of the Un Certain Regard section of the festival’s official selection.
Above: Emir Kusturica and actress, producer and singer Salma Hayek in Cannes, 2005.

Emir Kusturica is a member of The No Smoking Orchestra band. Their songs are a mixture of honky-tonk, gypsy tunes and punk rock. The group recorded the soundtrack to Kusturica’s film Black Cat, White Cat (1998).
Above: Emir Kusturica performing with The No Smoking Orchestra at Kiev's Balkanfest music festival.

In 2008, Kusturica released the documentary Maradona. The film is devoted to legendary Argentine football player Diego Maradona.
Above: Diego Maradona and Emir Kusturica share a light moment during the press conference for the documentary film "Maradona" at the 61st International film festival in Cannes.

Emir Kusturica is married to Maja Mandic, a producer of Life is a Miracle. The couple has two children: Stibor and Dunja.
Above: Emir Kusturica attends the 64th Cannes Film Festival opening ceremony at the Festival Palace, May 11, 2011.

Emir Kusturica was born on November 24, 1954 in Sarajevo, the Capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, then a constituent republic within Yugoslavia. In 2005, he was baptized into the Serbian Orthodox Church as Nemanja Kusturica. "My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. Ok, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were Orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that," Kusturica said.

Film director Emir Kusturica filming an ad for the UEFA EURO 2012 in the Kuskovo park.

Emir Kusturica wrote screenplays for most of his films; in many of them he made cameo appearances.
Above: Emir Kusturica and the French actress Audrey Tautou drink brandy on arrival on the Kustendorf film festival in Serbia, 2013.

According to Kusturica, Christians should try to bring more harmony to the world, and this is his task as an artist. In January 2010, at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, Kusturica was awarded the Patriarch Alexy II Prize in "recognition of his outstanding work to consolidate the unity of Orthodox nations and assert and promote Christian values in society."
Above: Emir Kusturica gestures during the Italian State RAI TV program "Che Tempo che Fa," in Milan, Italy.

Sarajevo-born film director Emir Kusturica, left, and Russian film director and actor Nikita Mikhalkov, President of the Moscow International Film Festival, seen at the closing ceremony of the Moscow International Film Festival in Moscow.