Underground

Snapshot

Underground — released in the former Yugoslavia under the title Bila jednom jedna zemlja ("Once Upon a Time There Was a Country") — is Emir Kusturica's sprawling tragicomic allegory of Yugoslavia across half a century, from the Nazi bombing of Belgrade in 1941 to the wars of secession in the 1990s. Built around two con men, the swaggering Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) and the manipulative Marko (Predrag "Miki" Manojlović), it uses a monstrous central deception — a cellar full of people kept manufacturing weapons for decades in the belief that the Second World War never ended — as a metaphor for the lie of Titoist Yugoslavia itself. The film is loud, carnivalesque, and relentlessly kinetic: brass bands, weddings, animals, gunfire, and drink swirl through a mode of Balkan magic realism that Kusturica had been developing across the previous decade. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival — Kusturica's second, after When Father Was Away on Business (1985) — and almost immediately became the center of one of the most bitter political controversies in modern European cinema, accused by French intellectuals of pro-Serbian apologetics even as it was hailed as a masterpiece of exuberant political filmmaking. Few films of the 1990s so completely fused formal virtuosity with contested meaning.

Industry & production

Underground was a major international co-production, financed principally through the French company CiBy 2000 — the production house of Francis Bouygues that also backed auteurs such as Jane Campion, David Lynch, and Pedro Almodóvar in this period — with German and Hungarian partners and Serbian participation. This transnational financing structure was itself a source of later controversy, as critics probed whether the film had received support connected to Slobodan Milošević's Serbia and its state broadcaster; Kusturica and his defenders disputed the more extreme characterizations, and the precise accounting has remained a subject of polemic rather than settled record, so I flag it here rather than assert a figure.

The production was logistically ambitious and lengthy, involving large physical sets — above all the vast subterranean world of the cellar — with shooting distributed across locations including Belgrade and studio work at Barrandov in Prague, then a favored hub for large European productions. The screenplay was adapted from and with the Serbian playwright Dušan Kovačević, whose theatrical sensibility for grotesque farce shaped the film's structure. Kusturica also produced a much longer version conceived for television, running to roughly five hours as a multi-part serial under the Bila jednom jedna zemlja title; the theatrical cut runs around 170 minutes. The film's Cannes triumph — the jury that year was presided over by Jeanne Moreau — made it a commercial and prestige event across art-house Europe, though it was received far more warily in some quarters once the political reading took hold.

Technology

Underground is a photochemical, analog production shot on 35mm film, and its aesthetic belongs squarely to the pre-digital tradition of physically staged spectacle. Its "effects" are overwhelmingly practical: real crowds, real animals, real pyrotechnics, elaborate constructed environments, and mechanical stunts rather than optical or digital compositing. The picture's most memorable images — a bombed Belgrade zoo with animals loose amid the rubble, a wedding that erupts into chaos, a brass band that seems to follow the characters through history — derive their force from the fact that they were built and performed in front of the camera. Where the film reaches for the fantastical, it does so through in-camera means and staging rather than post-production illusion, which is consistent with Kusturica's roots in a European production culture that prized the tangible, weighty presence of the profilmic world. The existence of a long-form television version also reflects the era's practice of shooting extensive coverage that could be recut for broadcast serialization.

Technique

Cinematography

The cinematography is by Vilko Filač, Kusturica's most important visual collaborator, who had shot his earlier features including When Father Was Away on Business and Time of the Gypsies. Filač's camera in Underground is almost never still: it plunges into crowds, cranes over banquets, tracks alongside running figures, and weaves through the chaos of celebration and violence with a mobility that makes the frame feel physically alive. The visual register is warm, dense, and often golden — a saturated, tactile look suited to the film's Bacchanalian energy. Compositions are packed with incident, foreground and background competing for attention, so that the image itself dramatizes the film's theme of excess and simultaneity. This restless, immersive camerawork is central to how the film generates its intoxicating momentum.

Editing

Cut by Branka Čeperac, Underground moves at a breathless clip, its editing keyed to the rhythms of brass music, drink, and mayhem. The film's overarching architecture is a three-movement historical scheme — commonly read as "War," "Cold War," and "War" again — and the editing must both sustain the frenetic within-scene tempo and manage vast temporal leaps across decades. The cutting frequently rides the momentum of the score and of physical action, favoring propulsion over repose; scenes of celebration are assembled to feel as if they might spin out of control at any moment. This tension between formal control and represented chaos is one of the film's signature achievements.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Staging is the beating heart of Kusturica's method here. Underground is organized around set-piece gatherings — weddings, feasts, funerals, reunions — that function as pressure cookers of human appetite, where music, food, sex, jealousy, and violence collide. The mise-en-scène is maximalist: every frame teems with bodies, animals (a chimpanzee, geese, and other creatures recur as anarchic presences), banners, instruments, and props. The central conceit gives the staging its allegorical spine: an entire community living underground, laboring at a permanent war economy, their subterranean world an elaborate theater of deception maintained from above. The vertical geography of surface and cellar becomes a spatial metaphor the film returns to again and again.

Sound

Sound is inseparable from the film's identity, above all the omnipresent brass. The score, by Goran Bregović — Kusturica's key musical collaborator across this era — draws on the driving, syncopated idiom of Balkan Roma brass bands, producing music that is at once festive and militaristic, celebratory and ominous. Themes associated with the film became widely known in the world-music circulation of the 1990s. Bregović's compositional practice, which drew heavily on traditional and folk sources, has itself been the subject of debate about authorship and attribution within the broader discourse around his career; within Underground, the effect is unmistakable — the band is a near-constant diegetic and non-diegetic force, a musical embodiment of a people who dance through catastrophe.

Performance

The performances are pitched to the film's operatic, farcical scale. Miki Manojlović's Marko is a study in charismatic treachery, sliding from black-market hustler to Party grandee while betraying everyone around him. Lazar Ristovski's Blacky is his boisterous, wounded counterpart — a man of appetite and violence whose credulity makes him the film's tragic engine. Mirjana Joković plays Natalija, the actress caught between them, and Slavko Štimac brings a fragile pathos to Marko's stammering brother Ivan and his beloved chimpanzee. The ensemble sustains a broad, physical, quasi-theatrical style — shouting, brawling, weeping, singing — that matches the maximalism of the staging without collapsing into mere caricature.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The dramatic mode is tragicomic allegory in the register of the grotesque. Adapted from Kovačević's material, the narrative fuses farce with historical tragedy: its comedy is broad and bodily, its tragedy national and irreversible. The story unfolds as a sustained fable, structured across the three great phases of Yugoslav twentieth-century history, and it repeatedly ruptures realism with fantastical flourishes — most famously a closing image in which a piece of land breaks away and floats off, accompanied by a valediction for a country that no longer exists. This is not naturalism but myth-making, a deliberately theatrical, hyperbolic mode in which characters stand for historical forces and the deception at the plot's core operates simultaneously as story and as political parable.

Genre & cycle

Underground sits at the crossroads of war film, historical epic, political satire, and magic-realist tragicomedy. It belongs recognizably to a Balkan cinematic vein of carnivalesque excess — brass, weddings, animals, drink — that Kusturica had done much to define. As war cinema it is anti-heroic and anti-monumental, treating grand historical events as farce shot through with grief. As satire it targets the mythology of Yugoslav socialism and the opportunism that outlives every regime. It can be productively grouped with the wave of films reckoning with the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, though its allegorical ambition and comic scale set it apart from more sober contemporaries.

Authorship & method

Underground is a paradigmatic Kusturica film and, for many, the fullest expression of his method. That method is collaborative and remarkably consistent: the director worked repeatedly with cinematographer Vilko Filač, whose fluid, immersive camera is a defining authorial signature, and with composer Goran Bregović, whose Balkan brass idiom is nearly synonymous with Kusturica's cinema of this period. The screenplay was written with the playwright Dušan Kovačević, whose theatrical sense of grotesque political farce is woven into the film's DNA, while editor Branka Čeperac shaped its propulsive rhythm. Kusturica's authorial signature lies in orchestrating human, animal, and musical chaos into an image of history as perpetual, intoxicated catastrophe — a vision by turns exhilarating and despairing. His well-documented immersion in Balkan Roma culture and brass music, his fondness for physically staged spectacle over illusion, and his refusal of tidy political closure all converge here.

Movement / national cinema

Kusturica emerged from the Yugoslav cinema of the late socialist period, and Underground is one of the last and greatest films to speak from — and about — Yugoslavia as an idea even as the state itself was dissolving. It is deeply enmeshed with questions of national cinema precisely because the nation in question was disintegrating: the film's transnational financing, its Serbian creative core, and its subject matter made it a lightning rod for arguments about who could represent the Yugoslav catastrophe and from what position. Kusturica, born in Sarajevo, occupied an especially contested vantage. The film thus belongs less to a stable "national cinema" than to the traumatic unbinding of one, which is central both to its power and to the controversy it provoked.

Era / period

The film is a product of the mid-1990s, made in the shadow of the very wars it stretches toward in its final act. That immediacy is inseparable from its reception: to make a grand tragicomic allegory of Yugoslavia's whole history while that history was still violently unraveling was an act of extraordinary ambition and, to its critics, of dangerous timing. The mid-1990s art-house economy — big European co-productions, festival prestige as commercial engine, world music's crossover moment — is legible throughout the project, from CiBy 2000's backing to Bregović's internationally circulated score.

Themes

At its core, Underground is about deception and betrayal as the founding conditions of a nation. The literal underground — people kept below the surface, laboring for a war they are told still rages — is a merciless metaphor for how populations are sustained in illusion by those who profit from the lie. Around this central image cluster the film's recurring preoccupations: the seductive theatricality of politics; the opportunist who thrives under every regime; appetite and celebration as both life force and self-destruction; and the persistence of violence across generations. The film mourns a lost country while refusing to sentimentalize it, insisting that the same appetites which make its people vividly, joyously alive also make them prey to demagogues and cheats. Its closing benediction — the land literally severed and adrift — crystallizes a vision of Yugoslavia as a dream that could not hold.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, Underground was received at Cannes as a tour de force and awarded the 1995 Palme d'Or, cementing Kusturica's standing among the leading European auteurs of his generation. Almost simultaneously it became the object of a fierce political controversy centered in France: the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut published a widely cited denunciation in Le Monde accusing the film of serving Serbian nationalist propaganda — a charge he leveled, notoriously, before having seen it — and the debate drew in numerous other intellectuals; Slavoj Žižek was among the prominent critics who read the film's mythologizing of Balkan vitality as politically compromised. Kusturica defended the work as anti-nationalist and anti-war, and the affair was widely reported to have contributed to his announcement of a withdrawal from filmmaking, from which he subsequently returned. The precise contours of the funding and political accusations remain contested, and I present them as a documented controversy rather than a settled verdict.

Influences on the film (backward): Underground draws on Kusturica's own prior cinema — the carnivalesque magic realism of Time of the Gypsies especially — and on Dušan Kovačević's tradition of grotesque political farce. Critics have long placed its maximalist, music-drenched spectacle in a lineage of exuberant humanist excess, with Federico Fellini frequently invoked as a touchstone; its blend of magic realism and historical allegory also resonates with a broader European and Latin American literary imagination, though such comparisons are interpretive rather than documented borrowings.

Legacy (forward): The film consolidated a recognizable "Kusturica mode" — brass bands, animals, weddings, and frenzied human chaos as a vernacular for Balkan history — that shaped perceptions of the region's cinema abroad and influenced how the wars of Yugoslav succession were narrated on screen. Bregović's score helped drive the 1990s world-music appetite for Balkan brass, an influence audible well beyond the film itself. And the Underground controversy became a standing case study in film-studies and political-philosophy discussions of representation, propaganda, and the ethics of allegory in times of atrocity — a debate the film continues to anchor. It remains Kusturica's most ambitious and most argued-over work, and one of the defining European films of its decade.