Showing posts with label Bosnia and Herzegovinia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bosnia and Herzegovinia. Show all posts

Fêted film-maker Emir Kusturica to bring literary town to life in Bosnia?

Posted: Wednesday, 9 February 2011 by Jimmy Christ in Labels: , ,
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The films of Emir Kusturica are essential viewing for any would-be Balkan traveller, from his earlier, bittersweet tales of growing up in communist Yugoslavia ('Do You Remember Dolly Bell?' and 'When Father Was Away on Business' being highlights) to his more volcanic celebrations of regional absurdity (such as 'Underground', 'Black Cat, White Cat' and 'Life is a Miracle'), resplendent with frantic pacing and brass bands. Now Kusturica could be adding to Bosnia and Herzegovina's physical landscape, not just its cultural one.

Having announced his intention to adapt Bosnian author Ivo Andric's Nobel prize winning 'The Bridge on the Drina', he's chasing funding in order to reconstruct the town of Kamengrad, near the titular Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge at Višegrad in Bosnia's semi-autonomous Serb entity, the Republika Srpska. He hopes if constructed, it'll be allowed to remain standing as a tourist attraction once filming is completed.

“In order to fulfill this grandiose cultural project, the state has to back it up,” said Kusturica to Glas Srpske. “As it stands, Serbia is interested to help filming Andric’s tale and the president of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, is willing and very eager to help [with the] construction.”

It won't be the first time Kusturica has build a town from scratch and Drvengrad, near Užice in the east of Serbia, was built specifically for 2004's sublimely beautiful 'Life is a Miracle', and remains not only his home, but home to art retreats, a ski resort and a film festival. If he recreates a similar feat for 'The Bridge on the Drina', it'll not only bring much needed tourism to the Republika Srpska which is often overlooked in favour of Mostar and Sarajevo, but provide a sorely needed celebration of Bosnia and Herzegovina's unique history and culture.

Bosnia needs to end its run of boring and banal monuments

Posted: Friday, 21 January 2011 by Jimmy Christ in Labels:
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Bosnia and Herzegovinia has enough problems on its plate getting its government to function properly, eliminating factitious, ethnically divided politics and clawing up the countryside's estimated 220,000 landmines, but for a country of such stunning Ottoman relics and powerful Tito-era monuments, its contemporary ones leave a lot to be desired.

Like its meaningless flag-by-committee which replaced the (arguably Islamocentric fleur-de-lis) BiH has a number of statues which range from the bafflingly banal, such as a gold Bruce Lee in the beautiful Herzegovinian city of Mostar, while the war is commemorated by a rock with some paint on it, to the more sober, like Tuzla's bust of civil rights martyr Martin Luther King, donated by the US embassy. While both apparently underline the fight for peace (with nunchucks, in Bruce Lee's particularly unconvincing case), the most striking common factor is how little they have to do with this beautiful, ancient land and its people.

It may well be better for reconciliation to avoid anything particularly loaded, like, for instance, the gold KLA statues with Albanian flags that undermine Kosovo's claims of multi-ethnic rainbow nation harmony, but from a travellers point of view, it's more than a little boring. In looking for symbols whose meanings can't be viewed through a sectarian lens, they're stumbling closer and closer to having symbols with no meaning at all, a trend already popular north of the border where Serbs have clutched Bob Marley and Rocky Balboa close to their deeply confused chests.

Easyjet rules out flights to, well, most of the former Yugoslavia

Posted: Thursday, 13 January 2011 by Jimmy Christ in Labels: , , , , , ,
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Britain's biggest low cost air carrier Easyjet has completely ruled out the possibility of flights to Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite earlier breathlessly reported claims to the contrary according to the Macedonian International News Agency. The airline currently flies to Slovenia, Croatia and, bizarrely, given their reluctance to fly to what might be lazily considered the 'shadier' Balkan counties, Pristina in Kosovo.