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And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
When Father Was Away on Business (Otac na sluzbenom Putu 1985)
"Away on Business"
Set during the 1948–1952 Tito–Stalin Split, Emir Kusturica's film uses the innocent eyes of a child to unveil the tragic absurdity of totalitarian paranoia.
This feature is one of 5 best films coming from former Yugoslavia
Emir Kusturica’s second feature (following on from the wonderfully observed Do You Remember Dolly Bell?) opens in Sarajevo during the troubled years following Tito’s break with Stalin and the Soviet Cominform, from 1948 to 1952.
The title ''When Father Was Away on Business'' refers to a trip taken by the young hero's parent - not a business trip, but a journey to a communist work-correction camps . It also indicates the perspective from which the story is seen by young boy.
The background of the story is set in voice-over narrative by Mesa's six-year-old son Malik, whose best friend Joza's father was taken away by "men in leather coats" after proclaiming publicly "I'd rather have Russian shit than American cake!"
It is from young Malik's view that the story is primarily told. His understanding of the arrest of Joza's father is only that "it was something to do with Stalin."
Malik’s father, Mesha, criticizes a cartoon in the party newspaper, and as punishment is sent to work correction camp.The fact that Mesha’s brother-in-law, a stern, bureaucratic Communist Party official, shares Mesha’s interest in the same young women only seals Mesha’s fate. As a result of his misdemeanor he is sent work in a mine, while the rest of his family is left to manage on its own (They will eventually later join Mesha in this work-correction camp in small eastern town in Bosnia).
Film follows the family through this crisis and then their return back to Sarajevo to some kind of normality again; it also captures some of Malik's formative experiences, including his first stirrings of love .
"When Father Was Away on Business" ("Otac na sluzbenom putu") is winner of the Golden Palm at 1985 Cannes Film Festival.
Born in Sarajevo (1954), Emir Kusturica is one of cinema's most distinct voices. A two-time Palme d'Or winner, he is a master of Magical Realism, blending tragedy with farce, war with weddings, and mud with gold. His films are loud, chaotic symphonies of Balkan life, often accompanied by the frenetic brass beats of the No Smoking Orchestra.
The Prague School & Early Poetic Realism
Born in Sarajevo in 1954, Kusturica studied at the prestigious FAMU in Prague (the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts), the same institution that nurtured the Czech New Wave. This background gave him a rigorous foundation in classical film grammar, but he used it to capture the distinct, messy texture of Balkan life.
His early masterpieces, Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981) and When Father Was Away on Business (1985), are deeply anchored in Sarajevo. They are tender, bittersweet coming-of-age stories that blend gritty socio-political realism with a quiet, dreamlike poetry.
The Evolution of "Balkan Magical Realism"
As his career progressed, Kusturica's style shifted dramatically from grounded melancholy to a carnivalesque, explosive, and hyper-kinetic maximalism often described as "Balkan Magical Realism."
This aesthetic signature is defined by several distinct elements:
- Sonic and Visual Chaos: His frames are packed with continuous movement, overlapping dialogue, animals roaming through scenes, and sudden bursts of slapstick.
- The Power of Brass: Music isn't a background element in Kusturica's cinema; it is a driving narrative force. His legendary collaborations with composer Goran Bregović (Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream, Underground) brought the frantic, ecstatic energy of Romani brass bands to global audiences, making the music inseparable from the visuals.
- Absurdist Myth-Making: He frequently uses surreal images—flying brides, floating chairs, or a community living underground for decades unaware that WWII has ended—to process profound historical trauma.
Three Essential Post-1985 Films
If you want to trace his evolution past When Father Was Away on Business, these three films represent his stylistic and thematic peaks:
Film | Year | What Makes It Critical |
Time of the Gypsies (Dom za vešanje) | 1988 | A breathtakingly lyrical, tragic epic centered on a young Romani boy with telekinetic powers. It fully consolidated his shift into magical realism and earned him Best Director at Cannes. |
Arizona Dream | 1993 | His surreal, highly idiosyncratic American detour starring Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, and Jerry Lewis. It’s a whimsical, melancholy dissection of the American Dream through a distinctly European lens. |
Underground (Podzemlje) | 1995 | His magnum opus and second Palme d'Or winner. An epic, tragicomic, three-hour allegory tracing the history of Yugoslavia from WWII through the Cold War to the Yugoslav Wars. It is a cinematic tornado of dark humor, historical grief, and |
When Father Was Away on Business is a seminal work of the "New Yugoslav Cinema" (also known as the Sarajevo School). Winning the Palme d'Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival and receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, it solidified Emir Kusturica's reputation as a world-class auteur.
The film is set in Yugoslavia during the early 1950s, a period of immense political tension following the Tito–Stalin split of 1948.
Historical Context: The Informbiro Period
The "business trip" mentioned in the title is a darkly ironic euphemism. In reality, the father, Mesa (Miki Manojlović), has been arrested and sent to a labor camp.
The Tito-Stalin Split: In 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Communist Information Bureau (Informbiro). Tito chose a path independent of the Soviet Union, leading to a domestic purge of "Stalinists" (real or perceived).
The Political Atmosphere: The film captures the paranoia of the era. A casual remark or a misplaced joke could lead to imprisonment on Goli Otok (the "Barren Island" labor camp).
Mesa’s Crime: Mesa is denounced by his own brother-in-law, Zijo, not necessarily out of ideological fervor, but because of a messy personal entanglement involving a mistress.
Visuals and Sound
The film acts as a crucial bridge in Kusturica's filmography. It scales back some of the unbridled, surrealist chaos of his later works (Underground, Black Cat, White Cat) in favor of a grounded, nostalgic, and melancholic texture, heavily aided by:
Cinematography: Vilko Filač’s warm, golden-hued lighting captures the bittersweet haze of childhood memory, contrasting the grim reality of political exile with the romanticized lens of youth.
The Music: The score captures the cultural shifts of the era, balancing traditional local melodies with the looming presence of Western influences (like tango and early rock) and Soviet-bloc undertones.
Legacy
When Father Was Away on Business stands alongside the works of the Black Wave and the Prague School graduates as a defining pinnacle of the region's cinematic history. It successfully demystified a taboo historical era not through an angry political tract, but through a deeply moving, deeply personal coming-of-age story.
Do You Remember Dolly Bell ? (1981)
Emir Kusturica's first film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? is a bittersweet comedy set in the former Yugoslavia during the 1960s. The film, which won the Golden Lion Prize at the 1981 Venice Film Festival, is both a coming of age story and a tribute to the city of Sarajevo, long before it was devastated by civil war. To the chagrin of his strict Communist father (Slobodan Aligrudic), sixteen-year old Dino (Slavo Stimac) is more into hypnosis and self-help mantras than Marxist ideology. He recites the phrase "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better" and sings in a new band mandated by the local Eastern European bureaucracy as they relax the Communist grip and allow some influence of Western culture.
Dino's family of six live in a cramped one-room house while they wait for state housing. The father drinks excessively and the family is poor. This is underscored when, during a visit to relatives, the youngest boy makes a point of saying how much he wishes he had a bicycle like the one he sees in the relative's home. Through Dino's relationship with Sonny, an unsavory pimp, he meets a cabaret singer and prostitute Dolly Bell (Ljiljana Blagojevic), named after a stripper in an Italian film they had seen recently at the Culture Club. Dolly is forced by Sonny to wait in the attic of Dino's home until he returns and Dino is a passive onlooker as a band of delinquent boys take their turn with her.
Dino's sweet innocence captivates the young girl, however, and the two form a bond that results in Dino's sexual initiation and first love affair. Dino has to cope with his father's illness, a lung cancer that has become life-threatening and their days together reveal a much mellower man who tells Dino he knew about the girl in the loft and no longer disapproves his using hypnosis and auto-suggestion. While Do you Remember Dolly Bell? lacks the polish and cinematic flair of Kusturica's later work, it is an honest and intelligent film that avoids sentimentality and provides compelling insight into what it meant to grow up in Eastern Europe during the sixties.
Themes & Cultural Texture
What makes the film so enduring is how it balances the intimate friction of growing up with the massive cultural shifts happening in Yugoslavia at the time:
The Clash of Ideologies: The protagonist, Dino (played wonderfully by Slavko Štimac), is caught between two worlds. On one side is his idealistic, strictly Marxist father, who heavily preaches communist orthodoxy at the dinner table. On the other side is the intoxicating, unstoppable wave of Western pop culture—hypnotism, early rock 'n' roll, and Italian pop music.
The Crimson and Clover Connection: The soundtrack's use of Adriano Celentano's "24.000 baci" (24,000 Kisses) becomes a literal anthem for Dino's generation. Watching the local youth awkwardly but passionately form a rock band to cover Western hits perfectly mirrors the broader societal shift toward modernization and youthful rebellion.
The Loss of Innocence: Dino's introduction to the criminal underbelly through the local hoodlums, and his complicated relationship with the cabaret dancer Dolly Bell (Ljiljana Blagojević) whom he is asked to hide, shifts the film from a lighthearted nostalgia piece into something much more poignant and raw.
It has that distinct, tragicomic Bosnian humor—where genuine heartbreak and socio-political gravity sit right next to absurd, everyday domestic comedy. It laid the thematic and stylistic groundwork for Kusturica and Sidran's next masterpiece, When Father Was Away on Business (1985).
Abdulah Sidran was the true emotional anchor and cultural cartographer of early Kusturica cinema. While Emir Kusturica provided the dynamic visual energy and stylistic flair, Sidran brought the literary weight, precise Sarajevo vernacular, and devastating psychological realism.
Without Sidran’s distinct poetic sensibility, those early masterpieces simply wouldn’t have the same enduring human ache.
1. Radical Topographical and Linguistic Realism
Sidran didn't just write scripts about Sarajevo; he wrote them from the absolute marrow of the city's mahalas (neighborhoods). As a celebrated poet, he possessed an unmatched ear for the local dialect, cadences, and humor.
The Power of Everyday Speech: In Dolly Bell and When Father Was Away on Business, the characters don't speak in polished movie dialogue or rigid ideological jargon (except when being satirized). They speak in a raw, authentic Bosnian idiom packed with dark humor, localized slang, and a specific blend of fatalism and warmth.
The Mahala as a Universe: Sidran grounded both films in tightly knit, claustrophobic communities. The realism comes from the lack of boundaries—everyone knows everyone's business, family arguments spill into the streets, and grand political shifts are felt not in government buildings, but at the kitchen table.
2. The Poet's Eye for the Miniature
As a poet, Sidran understood that massive historical and emotional truths are best expressed through tiny, hyper-specific human details rather than grand sweeping gestures. This directly shaped the bittersweet, melancholic tone of both films.
In Dolly Bell: The tragedy and comedy of Dino’s family are encapsulated in minor habits—like the terminally ill father obsessively organizing family meetings to vote on household chores using strict communist parliamentary procedure. Sidran finds the deep pathos in a man trying to govern his fracturing home the only way he knows how.
In When Father Was Away on Business: The terrifying reality of the 1948 Informbiro period (the Tito-Stalin split) is filtered entirely through the uncomprehending eyes of a young boy, Malik. Sidran deliberately avoids showing prison camps or brutal interrogations. Instead, the horror of political totalitarianism is measured by a father's sudden absence, a mother's exhausting lies to protect her kids, and Malik's intense, somnambulist sleepwalking.
3. Autobiographical Melancholy and Competing Realities
Sidran poured his own lived experiences into these screenplays. His own father had been arrested during the Informbiro period, meaning When Father Was Away on Business was a deeply personal exorcism.
He masterfully balanced a brutal, uncompromising look at post-war poverty and political paranoia with an almost lyrical, nostalgic tenderness for youth. This created a complex dual tone:
The Sidran Balance: The world his characters inhabit is gray, impoverished, and politically perilous, yet it is simultaneously illuminated by the intense, romantic inner lives of its young protagonists—whether through Dino's obsession with hypnotism and Italian pop, or Malik's innocent observations of adult hypocrisy.
4. A Humanist Buffer Against Cynicism
It would have been incredibly easy for films dealing with broken families, sexual exploitation, and communist labor camps to descend into unreadable bleakness. Sidran’s writing prevents this. He possessed a profound humanism that refused to turn his characters into simple villains or victims.
Even the uncle in When Father Was Away on Business who betrays Malik’s father over a careless remark is not painted as a monster, but as a weak, deeply compromised man trapped in a paranoid system. Sidran’s scripts treat human frailty with an immense, poetic mercy.
When Kusturica moved away from Sidran's scripts after Father, his cinema became progressively more surreal, chaotic, and operatic (Time of the Gypsies, Underground). But those first two films remain deeply grounded, aching, and uniquely poignant precisely because they were anchored by the soul of Abdulah Sidran's poetry.
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