This is an article I wrote for Boat Magazine – a nomadic publication that devoted its first issue to the city of Sarajevo. The photograph was taken by Max Knight.
Danis fiddled with an electronic cigarette.
“How old are you?” he asked me.
“Thirty,” I replied.
He put one end of the cigarette into his mouth, took the smallest drag and blew three perfect smoke rings that hung in the air like something from Disney’s Fantasia and broke just centimeters in front of my face.
“When I was one year older I won an Oscar,” he said.
In 2002, No Man’s Land won the Best Foreign Language Film at the 74th Academy Awards. It was the first feature Danis had directed.
When it comes to directing, Danis Tanović is undoubtedly a natural. When we met for lunch, he chose the venue, led the conversation, told the chef what to cook and me what I was eating – chicken curry, rice, fried potatoes, beef and mushrooms in pumpkin oil, then chocolate cake, and rakjia. I lent forward to chink glasses, unaware that he had already thrown his down his throat. He looked at me over the aluminum frames of his spectacles and smiled. No Man’s Land is the story of three wounded soldiers: a Bosnian and a Serb meeting in a trench between lines, and a third soldier who comes to, but can’t move a muscle because he’s lying on a mine. It’s an intelligent satire that explores the meaninglessness of war. There are no good guys or bad guys, for Danis they’re merely human beings caught up in an inhuman conflict. I asked him if the image of the soldier
lying on the mine was his picture of Bosnia at the end of the conflict.
“Not just for then,” he said, “for now.”
He said he thought that if nothing changes there will be another war. I hadn’t heard anyone talk like that in Sarajevo before.
The interview took an eccentric twist when he interrupted me to take a telephone call from his butcher, and after a debate I wish I could have understood, he settled on chicken for dinner. Danis has a great sense of humour. He asked what restaurants I’d been to, just to laugh at me struggling to pronounce them. He cites his favourite British films as Only Fools and Horses and ‘Allo ‘Allo! Over lunch, just as in his films, he landed punches in between the laughs. He joked about life in the war. “It was a lot of fun,” he said, “You could shag whoever you wanted. But was it better? If you ask me if I would like a grenade landing next to my child, then of course it isn’t.”
Danis lived in Paris and Brussels for almost a decade. He returned with his family to Sarajevo a few years ago.
“So why did you come back?” I asked.
“This is where I was born,” he said, “I was born in this shit-hole. Where were you guys born…? Well you were born it that shit-hole.”
He shrugged in a very Bosnian way and then went on to explain that his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Family comes first, he told me, then film, then everything else. He passed me his iPhone and showed me a photograph of his wife and children.
When I asked him if he was optimistic about the future, he was already primed with the reply, “A pessimist says ‘It can’t get worse’ and an optimist says ‘Oh, yes it can!’ Am I an optimist? Well it could be worse, so yes I am.” It was a line from No Man’s Land. Optimism is almost a dirty word in Sarajevo. Sometimes when you look around you can feel the soldier lying on the mine, but then, from time to time you catch these whiffs of optimism. Not so much in words as actions. In 2009 Danis started a tiny political party called Nasa Stranka, or Our Party. It was a reaction to the political situation in BiH with the nationalists on one side and socialists on the other. “We look to the West, not to Pakistan. Though don’t get me wrong, you haven’t got it right. You’ve come here to talk about war, and yet your country is at war, you just treat it like a video game.”
In 2010 Danis was elected to the city council. I pictured the Oscar-winning film director opposite me, in unending meetings about refuse collection. I asked why he started the party. He told me because he is a dumb-ass, that it was a stupid thing to do, but Danis is a man who gets excited about what’s possible.
“Obama,” he said, “Yes We Can! Yes he rode on this wave of false hope, but as a result of
the health care reform, 80 million people have healthcare that didn’t before and that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.”
He pulled his iPhone out to reinforce the point.
“Twenty years ago this would cost you £1billion and no one would know how to use it.”
Though his film-making is classically story driven, he’s excited by the opportunities of 3D films, and doesn’t think anyone’s used it well to date. Take the man lying on the bomb in No Man’s Land. How much better, he said, if the audience could experience and feel what it’s like to be lying on top of it. We would have banned land mines if people could experience what that felt like. Some years ago, when Danis returned to Sarajevo he was approached by a drunk guy in the street. “I know you,” he said, “you are Danis Tanović. You are Star Wars.” Danis knows that these days he comes from a different world, but recognizes that that is precisely why he is here. He could easily have carved out a nice life in Hollywood, or continue to raise his family in France or Brussels, but he wanted to be in government, because what Sarajevo needs are people on the inside who have seen the outside. “Everyone here does not look out there,” he said, “they believe what the newspapers tell them. If the papers say that the ‘84 Olympics was the greatest Olympics in the world, that is what they’ll believe. Which is why we’re in politics to move the boundaries. Just being here moves the borders a little nearer to France.”
Their party spent €50,000 on the election and they’re still paying the debts. The main parties spent millions. I asked him what success looked like.
“Survival,” he said, “No really, survival. We’re playing by the rules.”
“There goes the optimist again,” I said.
He reached across the table and topped up my rakjia.
We’re currently out in Detroit making the second issue of Boat Magazine. You can follow our progress here.
