Kusturica Begins Filming New Movie Curuzanka

There is something almost provocative in Emir Kusturica choosing Curug, a flat plain with no obvious cinematic flourish, for a story about a death that refuses to be final. After nearly ten years of silence in the feature format, since he signed On the Milky Road in 2016, the director has returned to set in a village in Backa, far from the festival lights that followed him for decades. The shoot began on June 10 almost quietly, which from the man holding two Palmes d’Or in Cannes reads almost like a performance of modesty.

Curuzanka is a film about a family that gathers for a grandmother’s funeral, only for the grandmother, instead of being buried, to come back to life. The story draws on motifs from the work of Valentin Rasputin, the Russian writer whose prose is rooted in the village, memory and the quiet erosion of community. Kusturica has shown an affinity for the Russian literary tradition before, so choosing Rasputin feels less like a whim and more like a logical extension of a poetics that has long moved between Slavic myth and rural grotesque.

Why a grandmother back from the dead?

A funeral that fails to happen is a rewarding dramatic frame, because in a single stroke it gathers an entire family, with all its unsettled accounts, and then strips away its only reason to gather. Kusturica has announced that the film is about a time of great moral reckoning. “The time has come for an enormous moral reckoning and collapse of the world’s societies,” the director said, framing a family farce as a miniature of something far larger. The returning grandmother is not merely a comic twist; she could just as easily be a metaphor for everything we consider finished, yet which stubbornly refuses to be buried.

The casting suggests Kusturica spared nothing. Vesna Trivalic, Miki Manojlovic, Milan Maric, Tamara Dragicevic, Andrija Milosevic and Seka Sablic form the core of an ensemble of about thirty actors. It is the densely populated frame this director loves, where no scene is left empty. The screenplay was written jointly by Kusturica and David Jakovljevic, which suggests the film will have a firmer narrative spine than this author is sometimes expected to deliver.

What does Curuzanka mean for Serbian cinema?

A co-production across several houses and a planned twelve weeks of work, until mid-September, signals an ambition that outsizes the average domestic project. For Serbian cinema, which in recent years has leaned more on smaller, more intimate auteur films, Kusturica’s return to the grand ensemble format carries a certain risk. His poetics, lavish and loud, have for decades divided those who see in it an authentic Balkan idiom from those who read it as mannerism.

What makes Curuzanka interesting is not the promise that it will be good, which is something only the screen can confirm, but the fact that Kusturica is once again attempting something large at a moment when the auteur film is retreating into silence. The plain around Curug, with its visual modesty, could be the most honest setting this director has ever chosen. It may also be the hardest test, because there is no exotic backdrop there to hide a weak story behind.

Whether Kusturica will find a new maturity in Curug or simply repeat a familiar festival formula remains a question the editing room will have to answer. What do you expect from his return to the feature film after ten years?