This film by Bosnian Muslim director Emir Kusturica (b. 1955), his second, won the Palme d'or at the Cannes film festival and projected him into the front ranks of East European filmmakers. Though few people in the film behave particularly well -- sometimes very badly indeed -- it is somehow a sweet and gentle story. After all, most of the offenses are within the family. The boy (Malik) and his father (Meša) are at the center of the film, and there are also his mother and older brother, a grandfather, his uncle the police official, and others. Behind the family there is the wider scene of Muslims and their neighbors in Sarajevo, which used to be perhaps the most successful mixed ethnic community in Eastern Europe. The picture gains unintended poignancy from having appeared only a few years before that community was terrorized by politics and warfare, its future perhaps destroyed.

The setting: The title is ironic. Father is not away on business: he has been arrested because his mistress repeated to a police official -- to his own brother-in-law, Zijo -- a mildly skeptical comment of Meša's about Stalin. The story begins in1950, soon after Yugoslavia's Communist regime under Tito broke away from Soviet guidance and struck out self-consciously on its own course; these were harsh and nervous years for Tito's government, which allowed no more freedom of expression than the Communists in other countries. The action of the film takes place largely in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, where Meša has been making a good career in the government until his disgrace. Meša first spends a year or so at hard labor in a mining camp and then undergoes exile to the provinces (for "resocialization"), and here his family is allowed to join him; this is in Zvornik, a Bosnian town on the Drina River a little ways downstream from (i.e., north of) Višegrad. By the end of the story (in 1952, we are told) we are back in Sarajevo and environs.

1) If you had not already been told, what signs might let you know that the story takes place mainly among Muslims?

2) What can you make of the relations of the Bosnian Muslims to other Yugoslavs, as shown in this film?

3) The political and the personal interact intimately in this film. Could you formulate how? Think especially of the father, the dominant figure in the film.

4) Would you want to make anything out of the fact that the whole story takes place a little while before the director was born?