• Death of Joe Strummer.

Previous leader of The Clash died at 50 on 23 december 2002 in England. He was seen several times on stage with Emir & the No Smoking Orchestra, we see him also singing, moving, jumping, and playing guitar in the film Super 8 Stories. About their music, he said :”In England, everybody plays the same thing, you see : guitar, drums. We don't have guys like them over there. This music is eclectic, it has really a new taste, an unusual taste. It's certainly the music of the future, and the music of the past. It's why I love Emir !”

• Exhibition Citoyens Bohèmes at the Printemps Haussmann in Paris : from 19 september to 12 october a clothes, photos, videos, objects, perfumes and sculptures exhibition on the theme “citoyens bohèmes”. Emir Kusturica was honoured with the recreationof the wedding table of the film Underground some video extracts and the broadcast of film Super 8 Stories.

• Last news from the shooting of Hungry Heart : everything goes well… So well that the shooting should end on time ! (it's not usual with Emir Kusturica…) The shooting should last until end of november, or beginning of december. It's still forseen to present the film in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003.

• A new interview : Emir Kusturica speaks of his new film, of september 11, the bombs in Afghanistan.

• Re-release of the soundtrack of Arizona Dream and new album of Goran Bregović. After rights problems, the soundtrack had been removed from the sales a few weeks after its release. For the release of Goran Bregović's new album, it was thus rereleased, with a bonus track (Johnny Depp's monologue on his childhood)… and the credits are now complete for In the Deathcar. The theme of the song was indeed borrowed from a Corsican song Solenzara. The packaging (cover, booklet, CD) remains unchanged.

Goran Bregović's new album is called Tales and Songs from the weddings and the funerals, and is a mix of creations, romanian and yugoslav folklore, and recalls the atmospheres of Underground. It gives a very pleasant album, very well produced, dynamic and nice.

• Inhabitants of Kostunicevo have offered to Emir Kusturica an old house. To thank him for the moments passed on the shooting, Emir Kusturica was given a house older than 200 years, and a huge garden in Kostunicevo by the inhabitants of the village. It's the first “eco-village” of Serbia. Taking a pause during the shooting, Emir went on august 6 in Kostunicevo to visit the house and declared it would be the ideal place to rest after the adventure of the shooting, and even, to stay there after…

• Here are the last anecdotes reported by a journalist in Sarajevo, from the shooting of Hungry Heart :
  • Emir had to shoot a scene with bears and wolves. During the shooting, most of the Animals ran away in the forest… and impossible to bring them back on the set !
  • Later, they had to shoot a delicate scene where a bear gets into an house, breaks the door, takes a bath, watch TV and drinks beers. The bear did all that without any problem. Nobody understood.
  • Always with the animals, a dog had to un after a car. After 5 missed takes, the dogs was completely tired. The dog trainer said the animal was really tired and that he had to rest, but Emir, furious that the car was driving whether too fast whether too slow gets angry and said : ”But how can he be tired, we've only made it five times !”
  • A scene was to film a fight between Football suporters. There were on the ground 500 persons : Bosnians, Serbs and Croats, no professional actor. The scene ran perfectly, but at the first shot, there were already 12 wounded persons.

• Release of Super 8 Stories in DVD. With more than a month late, the DVD of Super 8 Stories is fainlly released ! Beside the possibility to add the subtitles (which allows to understand the lyrics of the songs… it's quite interesting !), the publisher gave us in bonus half an hour extract of the great concert at the “vieilles charrues”, as well as 3 video-clips of the band :
  • Bubamara
  • Pit-Bull
  • and an older song, pretty kitsch !

• Some news of Hungry Heart :

Kusturica is shooting his 7th film in Serbia by Jean-Eudes BARBIER
MOKRA GORA (Yugoslavia), 14 may (AFP) - The yugoslav director Emir Kusturica is, since last february, shooting in Serbia his 7th film, his gorgeous poetic career, on imagination, real and crual, started more than 20 years ago.
Faithful to his fire mood, Kusturica started this new adventure with all his obsessions we've already seen in his films, like absurdity of the borders and ideologies, which are sources of divisions between the minds, the people, and generate devasting conflicts.
His future film, “Hungry heart”, is mainly shot in the region of Zlatibor, close to Bosnia.
This morning, the railway which climbs up Mokra Gora (wet mountain) is the shooting set for the strange dialogue between two men and a female donkey, staying in the middle of the tracks.
Impossible to move her. Why ? Love pain ! The make-up woman puts drops of water under the eye of the animal, in order to simulate the tears.

• Why is she crying ? asks one of the men.
• Whe wants to die, and waits that a train kills her, answers the owner of the donkey, who seems to be powerless face to this event.

Waiting (for the death) is likely to be long because the track is still being assembled.
“Hungry Heart” tells the story of an engineer, who is building a railway between Serbia and Bosnia. But the war of 1991 –burst of Tito's Yugoslavia– interrumpts the work.
The responsible stays there to ensure the protection of the work, but his son has to do the army, and he's made prisonner. He will be exchanged against a muslim woman on which the father has fallen in love…
Kusturica, long hair, athlet body, always had, at 48, the gaze of passion. Smoking a big cigare, he gives orders, jokes, runs under a tent with the controle screen, talks with the tecnicians, gives advices to the actors.
One of them, Slavo Štimac, is a familiar of the Sarajevo-born director, forhaving played major roles in two of his preceding films, “Do you remember Dolly Bell?” (1981) and the famous “Underground” (1995), respectively primed at the Mostra of Venice and the festival of Cannes (palme d'or).
But Kusturica also loves having non professional actors. For “Hungry heart”, several members of his crew went to find Obrad Djurovic on a desolated place of Republika Srbska (RS), the Serbian entity of Bosnia, where he found refuge after having taught mathematics for forty years in Sarajevo.
Astrakan hat on the head, boots and long coat, Djurovic only wants to get back home, but he has nice words for Kusturica. “I love his way of making the animals speaking, the way men do in life. This film will be a fable. It will be a big success”, he says.
Animals always have a big place in Kusturica's films. In a short film of 1996, he told the story of a Serb who could access his house only by getting through the gardens of his neighbours. Since he had argued with them, he was dreaming of being a bird…
The last scenes of “Hungry heart” should take place in october and the film should be released in 2003. Made partly with foreign money, the film will have a music composed by the “No Smoking Orchestra” whom bass player is no other than Kusturica.

• Release of the Collector DVD edition of Arizona Dream. Full of bonus, this DVD gives a new look on the cult film, thanks to a previously unreleased 12 minutes scene, cut from the final film by the american producers.

• Emir Kusturica has been named Ambassador of UNICEF for Yugoslavia

”The look he has on the children and the young people (not only in his films) ; the way the world is seen through his eyes, and mstly the exploited children, or the children from minorities, pleased us.” (Jean-Michel Delmotte, Representing UNICEF in Yugolsavia)

• Begninng of the shooting of Hungry Heart in Bosnie. Information received from Nina, journalist at Oslobodjenje newspaper in Sarajevo. It's a story on war and love. Luka is Serb and he dreams of building a railway between Serbia and the Adriatic coast, therefore, he must build 19 km in Bosnia. All was going on very well when war burst ! Luka is not a soldier, but his son is. He joins the Serbian army, and the Bosnian army arrests him. The nurse Sabaha, who is Bosnian is also arrested, but by the Serbian army. They give her to Luka, as an hostage and wait for a solution. The drama begins when Luka falls in love with Sabaha and they decide to run away from Bosnia and the war. Actors are : Slavko Štimac, Nataša Solak, Davor Janjic, Mirjana Karanović, Aleksandar Berček, Branka Katić, Vesna Trivalić and Adnanan Omerovic, student at Dramatic academy of Tuzla (Bosnia). The author of the story is Ranko Bozić, and the director of photography should be Thierry Arbogast.