Black Cat, White Cat

• Silver Lion of the Best Director at the Mostra of Venice, 1998

Matko is a small time hustler, living by the Danube with his 17 year old son Zare. After a failed business deal he owes money to the much more successful gangster Dadan. Dadan has a sister, Afrodita, that he desperately wants to see get married so they strike a deal: Zare is to marry her. But none of the two care much for an arranged marriage: Zare is in love with Ida, Afrodita is waiting for the man of her dreams.

French trailer

• Bajram Severdzan …. Matko Destanov
• Srđan Todorović …. Dadan Karambolo
• Branka Katić …. Ida
• Florijan Ajdini …. Zare Destanov
• Ljubica Adžović …. Sujka
• Zabit Memedov …. Zarije Destanov
• Sabri Sulejman …. Grga Pitic
• Jasar Destani …. Grga Veliki
• Stojan Sotirov …. Bulgarian customs officer
• Predrag Laković …. the priest
• Miki Manojlović …. the wedding officer

The soundtrack was written by the No Smoking Orchestra.

Details, titles and lyrics of the soundtrack.

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Regarding the music, Emir Kusturica says : ”what we obtain at the end is a kind of mixture between the traditional music and the Cuban “sound”, a world music impossible to identify precisely, in a word : free. Nothing more normal finally, since the music is the synthesis of all the other.” The gypsy soul is present indeed in this music of a disrespectful freedom.

Working title of the film was Acrobatic Music, and if you look closely at the generic, there is no title ! Just the silhouette of a pair of cats…

• ”Your parents are watching you from above”
• ”They can't see anything. It's cloudy”

”I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship…”

The burlesque of the film is partly inspired by the comic strip Alan Ford, of Italian origin, but having had a strong success in Yugoslavia in the Eighties. Alan Ford is a lousy publicity agent who becomes a secret agent ; sort of James Bond parody, his adventures are quite delirious.

See a fan website.

We even see in Dadan's limousine one of his friends who reads an Alan Ford comic book while the other play dices…

There is a restaurant named Black Cat White Cat in St Petersbourg, in Russia. As we can imagine, it is a restaurant specialised in Serbian food. A giant screen behind the bar shows Russian or Yugoslav films, among which of course, Emir Kusturica's film. A local journalist underlines the plates are quite good…

  The Black Cat White Cat (Chyornaya Koshka Bely Kot) 13, Pestelya Ulitsa. Tel: 276 7430.
  For 2 persons, with vin : 1,020 roubles (30 euros). 

In the film Darwin's nightmare by Hubert Sauper, we can see several scenes from the film Black Cat White Cat on a black & white television with the Russians in Tanzania. They stop their conversation and say laughing : ”look : it's our people on TV”.

• Télérama. ”Emir Kusturica comes back to gypsies, for an optimistic and truculent joke… With married and brass band, odds and ends and herd of geese.”
• Monsieur Cinéma. ”The comic attitude splashes everything, even the music. It is enough to see how Kusturica definitively ridicules techno music and shows his great tenderness for a gypsy musicians formation. A great director is back, his film is an homage to burlesque, life and love… Cheers !”
• Le courrier des Balkans : ”The time of the bear, lions and palms hunting is behind him. Now, he can have fun and shoot films. It possible that this film be the first of a new career (splendid), less turned towards festivals successes and more dedicated to an aesthetic and hedonist manner to make films. ”