Well, I've had quite an adventure since last week. I've been to Serbia and back, to attend a really interesting and strange film and music festival at the home and personal village of famed Serbian auteur moviemaker, musician and actor, Emir Kustarica, deep in the mountains of the Mokra Gora region near Bosnia. As I sit here on the couch back in L.A. at 5:30 am, (it's something like 2:30 in the afternoon in Serbia and my body, though never really adjusted to European time, nonetheless made some motions in that direction apparently, because I am usually not wide awake and craving a greasy meal and a pilsner at this time of day,) it all seems like a dream that I was in Belgrade yesterday morning. I hardly know what to write about, it was such a trip. Literally.
I should probably start with Emir Kustarica, one of my favorite filmmakers and a great artist and the benefactor of this trip for Tim and I as representatives (loosely on my part) of Moviemaker Magazine. Kustarica's films 'Black Cat, White Cat' and 'Time of the Gypsys' are two of my favorite films, but I like anything he does. His movies are not for everyone and his one foray into Hollywood with 1993's 'Arizona Dreams' produced a movie with a somewhat weak storyline and galvanized him as a studio outsider, so don't place that one as a priority, but if you like the absurd and can find patience for magical realism and lots of accordion music I recommend them all as alternately a rollicking good time and a complex and melancholy look at cultural reality/political history/social problems/psychological portraits and loosely defined animal husbandry practices of the Balkans, particularly the former Yugoslavia. He has created this festival in a historic Serbian ethno-village, Drvngrad, nicknamed Kustendorf, that he built as a set for one of his movies and then had turned into his personal home as well as a rustic tourist resort and national park. Kustendorf is a play on his nickname, Kusta, and also means village by the sea in German, which it plainly is not. Absurd, and apparently meant to be some dig at his government for their attitudes toward the Germans at the time that he built it a few years ago. As despot of this tiny kingdom of little wooden houses, cobblestone streets named after remarkable characters like Nikola Tesla, Federico Fellini, and Che Guevara, a few restaurants and bars, some kittens and happy little dogs, an indoor swimming pool and incredible, timeless views of the misty, moody mountains and humble little homesteads in the valley below he has managed to pack it over the last 3 years with lots of young, mostly Eastern European filmmakers, journalists from all over Europe, the Cannes mafia, and a few high profile lefty Hollywood rogues, like Jim Jarmusch and Oliver Stone in the past, and Johnny Depp and Ralph Fiennes this year. It was a really good program, with an interesting, sometimes claustrophobic scene of stylish people jammed elbow to elbow in the theater, the restaurant, and bars while accordion music seemed to play incessantly and nearly everyone chainsmoked in all venues like they were their own little personal nicotine factory smokestacks. Pork, potatoes and cabbage were featured at every meal, as well as beer and slivovic at most. Slivovic is plum brandy that you could strip your furniture with, drunken out of little shot containers shaped like lab beakers. I love Eastern Europe. I love the absurd and the irreverent. This phrase was actually said by Johnny Depp in a workshop that he gave at the festival, but it rang so true for me, and so appropriate for this festival that I wrote it down and it's been ringing in my head ever since. Kustarica is a master of the absurd and irreverent, which seem to veritably breed in the Balkans, along with accordions and cigarettes. The opening night band, a Slovenian and Austrian group, covered some local favorites as well as Proud Mary, Like a Vrigin and Besame Mucho in the Austrian folk tradition with an accordion (of course), trumpet, trombone, guitar, clarinet and smoking lead singer babe. It was absurd and wonderful. We unfortunately had to leave before Kustarica's band, The No Smoking Orchestra, (which now having been to a Serbia and had my clothes, skin, hair and innards no doubt fumigated in a stew of second hand smoke, I recognize as the most absurd ironic name of a band ever), rocked the house for the final ceremony. Overall I found it to be a really stimulating and artistically inspiring event, in a melancholy and beautiful part of the world.
I traveled in Eastern Europe extensively about 10 years ago, but couldn't get into parts of the former Yugoslavia with an American passport at that time, so this trip filled in some of my missing passport stamps and refreshed my sense of place to that region. A few other fun Americanized observations from the former Eastern bloc that were reinforced for me this time were the unnerving fact that although people there really are very friendly, helpful and kind, smiling is not widely practiced, but staring is. As soon as help is requested or a question is asked though the somber mask will be broken and people bend over backwards in helpful kindness. And many Eastern European women really are very hot, or even if they're not that hot they really know how to dress so that men won't notice that. Many Eastern European men on the other hand are really big and tall and often (sorry), more in the range of not so good looking all the way to ugly, greasy or scary looking and have a habit of wearing their pants up around their ribcages, yet they always have these really hot babes on their arms, making them perhaps some of the luckiest men in the world! Also, as our cab driver explained to us, Serbian salaries are amongst the lowest in Europe, but still every cafe, restaurant, bar and club are full from morning to....well, the next morning because parties start late and go all night, any night of the week there. As he said, "Serbs live like today is the last day on earth." A short, cold, grey, drunken day but filled with lots of passion, music and cigarettes. And really, who can begrudge you a few cigarettes, and plenty of passion and music if they help to lighten the tortured slavic soul because as a different cab driver explained to us, "Serbs never forgive and never forget," and that's a hard way to live through thousands of years of wars and occupations and broken alliances and broken dreams. Serbia is hopefully on it's way toward dealing with some of the horrible events of the past two decades, joining the European Union and improving its economy. I hope Serbia can change in the ways that it needs to....but not so much that its soul loses any of the beauty, just some of the torture.
I love travel. I love an adventure and am willing to go through a lot to get one. Adventures are often expensive and usually involve being jet-lagged, tired and at least occasionally lost, being stared at and not being able to understand what everyone is saying, eating and drinking strange things and for me anyway, usually being sick for at least short periods of time, and from time to time being pilfered from, robbed or swindled. In short being palpably vulnerable to the world. And that vulnerability, although it induces some fear, also opens something up that lets the beauty in with the volume up. I won't even start on my reminiscences of those unexpectedly beautiful travel moments coined in my memory that are like riches from the universe. Well, ok, just a few; an evening spent in a small hut perched on a volcanic hillside being served beans and rice and playing with a small girl as the fireflies and an electrical storm flashed above the lake outside, waking up on a bus pulling into majestic Istanbul at sunrise and having my hair ruffled and being handed a homemade pickle by a Bulgarian grandpa sitting near me, finding a little town where they make chestnut ice cream and then driving a winding narrow road down through the mountains of Provence to the sea. Now I can add perching in the cold between a railing and the rooftop of a little wooden Serbian house to get a picture of the crowd below drinking and smoking and dancing and waiting for the opening ceremony as fireworks shot up over the wooden roofs and cinders fell down in our hair. My memories of beautiful travel adventures are as dear to me as anything I own. It's all worth it for that wonderful 'soul in wonder' feeling of learning about people living a different kind of life, and being a stranger in a strange and wonderful place. The world opens up, or more likely I open up, and I feel so alive and lucky to be alive and so in love with whatever patch of the globe I am standing on.
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