- The Guardian, Saturday 15 May 2004 02.34 BST
Emir Kusturica's Life is a Miracle is the latest competition offering at Cannes. Set against the backdrop of the 1992 war, it is a story about a Serbian man, Luka, and a Muslim girl, Sabaha, who fall in love across enemy lines: a sort of Balkan Romeo and Juliet. "The background generates a major conflict of the emotions, the love between Luka and Sabaha," Kusturica said yesterday.
"The film happened to be placed in Bosnia, because it was a true event, told me by a Serbian man living in Toulouse. If it had happened in Rwanda or Korea I would have gone there to make the movie."
This seems a touch disingenuous from a man who has rarely shied away from the politics of his homeland.
His 1995 film Underground was accused by French critics of being a "postmodern version of the most drivelling and lying Serb propaganda". He claims that two houses he owned in Sarajevo were burned by Bosnian Muslims because "my thinking was the opposite from what was the political attitude in Sarajevo".
In the same year he punched the leader of the New Serbian Right movement, whose wife joined in the fray, beating the director round the head with her handbag, a present from her "dear friend" Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy even made a film to attack him.
Mr Kusturica, who is from a mixed Serbian and Muslim background, is also the only person in the history of the Cannes film festival to have twice won the coveted Palme d'Or - in 1995 with Underground, and 10 years earlier with When Father Was Away on Business.
In the new film, Luka's son Milos is drafted into the army but is captured. A Serb soldier offers Luka a young Muslim woman as a hostage to exchange for his son. But Luka falls in love with Sabaha and must choose between his mistress and his son.
Kusturica yesterday said his film was a "Shakespearean drama in the Balkans". Apart from similarities with Romeo and Juliet, there are references to King Lear and Twelfth Night.
Kusturica, who once said that he believed that "one frame of a Ken Loach film is worth more in my view of values than the entire Hollywood output of the last 15 years", expressed pessimism about the state of the film industry. "Cinema needs to be bigger than life," he said. "At the moment life is drastic, politically, historically, socially. Cinema does nothing about this."
Kusturica is not a man to mince his words. He once described the former foreign secretary Robin Cook as "a small, hairy muppet". Told that the politician was regarded as a ladykiller, he replied: "You mean women want to have sex with him? How could they take him into their beds? What kind of women have you in England? I would rather go with a goat."
