The car stops at the border post between Bosnia and Serbia, and Emir Kusturica starts singing from the passenger seat:

The border guard in the booth starts laughing and is soon joined by other colleagues for the impromptu concert. It’s the main song from Underground, Kusturica’s most famous movie and winner of the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1995. Everybody here knows it.

The director suddenly pauses, his exhibition seemingly over. But when one of the officers is about to say something, he starts singing again with even more pathos, feigning torment.

The border guards – whom like many others address him as ‘Professor’ (for a short period he taught Film Directing at Columbia University in New York) – burst into laughter and simply wave him through without demanding his passport. ‘Every time I cross, I sing’, says Kusturica, who was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1954 and who is now a Serbian citizen. ‘But I don’t give them my documents. Once I had an argument with a Bosnian Croat [who speak a different dialect of Serbo-Croatian] who asked for my papers: “Your language is not my language, I don’t understand you.

Do you watch television? You know who I am, so just don’t stop me!”’ Objectively arrogant things to say, but it’s hard not to laugh listening to him in the darkness of the backseat, from where I ask my questions.

This border doesn’t seem to mean much to him. Over the last 20 years, he has built two small towns on either side of it: Küstendorf, in Serbia, and Andrićgrad, in Bosnia. The latter is a homage to his lifelong personal hero, the Nobel prize winner writer Ivo Andrić; the former to himself. For this interview, I was invited to Küstendorf at the homonymous film festival that the director has organized for the last 18 years. After waiting for three days, I was told that the interview would take place in the car on the 45-minute drive from Andrićgrad (where we went for a day visit) to Küstendorf. ‘I hate interviews, and I rarely give them’, he tells me before getting into the car with his driver. But once we start moving, it’s actually hard to interrupt him.

‘So, Putin? I love Putin, and that’s why they hate me in Europe.’ Kusturica is clearly someone with many things to say and who couldn’t care less if he sounds controversial. Once the cinema prodigy from the Balkans, over the years he has developed a kaleidoscopic and indecipherable identity, blending Romani culture, anti-globalization sentiment, Slav pride, and – ultimately – full-scale Putinism. I expected some of his answers, but I didn’t anticipate that he would freely ramble on everything I asked.

This is not the first time I have met Kusturica. The first time was in 2017, during a vacation on the Greek island of Sifnos. I didn’t dare bother him, but I asked my girlfriend to take pictures of me with him in the background. At the time, I didn’t know about the political journey he had embarked on. My father had shown me his movies when I was a kid – especially Black Cat, White Cat and Maradona – and when I met him in Greece (where he owns a summer house) I was just an unquestioning admirer. It was only last year that I stumbled upon a video of him talking to Vladimir Putin during a private meeting at the Kremlin, in April. What had happened to the maverick director I remembered from my childhood?

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Kusturica was the rising star of European cinema. He is still one of the few filmmakers who has won the Palme d’Or twice (When Father Was Away on Business, 1985, and Underground, 1995). His awards also include Best Directing, in Cannes, in 1988, for Time of the Gypsies, two Silver Lion, in Venice (Do You Remember Dolly Bell?, 1981, and Black Cat, White Cat, 1998), one Silver Bear, in Berlin, for Arizona Dream, in 1993, and one Oscar nomination for Best Foreign movie for When Father Was Away on Business. Celebrated as ‘Fellini’s heir’, he took over the professorship in Film Directing at Columbia University from Milos Forman in the early 1990s. His best friend was Johnny Depp – at the time still an immaculate superstar – whose daughter he godfathered. In short, he was living the life, blessed with Western chrism. How did a prolific intellectual – who had lived in New York and Paris, praised and prized in every major film festival, whose movies about Romani culture ooze a love for freedom that borders anarchy – how did someone like that end up at the court of Putin?

Driving from Belgrade to Küstendorf, it is immediately clear that this is not the West anymore, or at least that there is something else far from the West. Just outside the airport, a mural on an overpass reads ‘Kosovo is Serbia’. Serbian flags flank the road to the capital for kilometers. The motorway to Kusturica’s fortress, three hours from the capital, carries the name of ‘Miloš the Great’, and I suddenly realize I don’t know much about this place.

Past the plains around Belgrade, the road starts climbing through a series of gorges to the southwestern mountains of Serbia, where, in 2004, the director built the set for his movie Life is a Miracle. The set later became Küstendorf – also called Drvengrad (timber town) and Mećavnik – which over the years he has expanded to a traditional Serbian village/resort of about 30 wooden buildings perched on the side of a hill. There is the small Gavrilo Princip amphitheater, two cinemas, two restaurants, one swimming pool, a couple of bars, and two tennis courts. From the main square, Kusturica’s villa and a Christian Orthodox church complete with a bell tower dominate the village. ‘Whoever has no house now will not build one’, quotes Küstendorf’s website from Rainer Maria Rilke, to which Kusturica has added: ‘and I believe that he who had one and lost it will find it again.’ It is here, in ‘the free mountains of Serbia’, that he has been living after deciding he couldn’t return to his hometown, Sarajevo, after the Yugoslav wars.

People keep telling me that someone who names a village after himself must be a narcissist. I haven’t been with him long enough to figure it out. More than about himself, his domain is a celebration of his personal Olympus. The main squares are named after Ivo Andrić, Abbas Kiarostami, and Nikola Tesla. They are connected by streets and alleys dedicated to Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Ernesto Che Guevara, Novak Djokovic, Bruce Lee, and others. Big portraits of Yuri Gagarin, Diego Armando Maradona, and Fidel Castro are stenciled side by side on the wall of a house. A mural of Fyodor Dostoevsky guards a little woodshed. It is here that, since 2008, he has hosted the Küstendorf film festival.

‘Initially it was much smaller, just a few houses’, says Edoardo De Angelis, an Italian director who won the Critics’ Award at the first edition of the festival and who is now on the jury. ‘Mining companies wanted to exploit this nickel-rich terrain, but he managed to make it a protected area. At that time, the festival was much rougher, with more drinking and more, let’s say, “unconventional” company.’

Now the attendance is a mix of niche filmmakers, young authors, leftist journalists, communist journalists, local people, cinema students, Chinese tourists, youngsters who like to party, and Kusturica’s close circle. Guests and festival competitors come here from all over the world, but the most represented nationalities are by far Serbian and Russian. Travel and accommodation for most of the guests (including me) have been covered by the organizers. Only drinks are not included, and there is quite some drinking. The cornerstone of Küstendorf is the restaurant and its buffet, with people smoking at the tables, ordering wine and rakija. Kusturica has his own, larger, table for his friends and notable guests.

People on less familiar terms stand by for a favorable moment to exchange a word or two with the Professor. There is a lot of talk about cinema, arts, and Serbia. Much less about Russia, Putin, and Ukraine. Everybody knows Kusturica’s political positions, and nobody wants to be a party pooper.

‘You find him at a good time,’ says De Angelis, whose movie Comandante opened the Venice Film Festival in 2023. ‘Ten years ago, he would have given you one minute for the interview.’ Previous guests include Abbas Kiarostami, Alfonso Cuaron, Matteo Garrone, Matt Dillon, Paolo Sorrentino, Jim Jarmusch, and Kusturica’s bestie, Johnny Depp. The star of this edition is Yura Borisov, a Russian actor nominated at the Oscars for Best Supporting role in Anora, Palme d’Or winner movie in 2024 and Best Picture at the last Academy Awards. Amid the cheering and applause from Borisov fans (mainly Russians), Kusturica announced that the actor will be the protagonist of a movie he’s working on.

The next day, in our carpool karaoke on the border between Bosnia and Serbia, he has enthusiastic words about Borisov; less flattering for Anora and the Golden Palm. ‘Golden Shit. Full of little beautiful things’, he says about the award he won twice, given to a film screened at his own festival. ‘Now the Golden Palm is given to a guy for some sexual movie or whatever [Anora] But there is no love. There’s sex. So there is no movie. I’m Christian, and as a Christian I need love in cinema.’

As his first name suggests, Emir Kusturica wasn’t always a Christian. He was born into a secular Muslim family and his father, Murat, worked at the Information Secretariat of Socialist Bosnia, part of former Yugoslavia. Young Emir grew up in Sarajevo in a neighborhood of ‘government employees, military, and poor gypsies’. Religion wasn’t an important aspect in his family: the Muslim Murat used to recite the Pater Noster in Latin to calculate the boiling time of eggs: the long version of the prayer for hard-boiled, the short one for à la coque. If not religiosity, Emir inherited from his father the love for politics. Murat and his friends were mostly Yugoslav partisans, attached to the Soviet Union and the memories of the liberation from Nazism. Despite his faith in Yugoslavia, Murat didn’t hide his contempt for Tito, and his wife scolded him for constantly talking politics and drinking. Emir himself loved to scandalize customers in bars, by insulting the State and its leader.

[...]