When Father Was Away on Business

A film set in Sarajevo in the 1950s, told by a child. Malik is six. His father Mesa works, chases women and talks too much. He makes one remark about a political cartoon in front of the wrong person. His wife's brother, who is a party official, and a woman he has been seeing both pass it on. He is taken away. The family is told he is away on business. From there the film follows the years of that absence. The mother holds the house together, the older brother sleepwalks, and Malik keeps asking questions that get answered with lies. The father is at a labour camp on an island, then in internal exile in a small town where the family eventually joins him. What the narrative is interested in is not the camp but the lie: everyone around the boy keeps up the same story, and the film shows a whole society doing that at once. The period is specific. The split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union sent thousands to camps as suspected Stalin sympathisers, and the arrests were often personal rather than political. Malik sleepwalks through much of the film and the sleepwalking scenes are shot as though nothing unusual is happening. The father is not made noble. He is unfaithful, weak and often ridiculous, and the film is warmer for that. Moreno de Bartoli plays Malik, with Predrag Manojlović as Mesa and Mirjana Karanović as the mother. Emir Kusturica directed; it was his second feature and it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Who it is for: anyone interested in Yugoslav cinema and family stories told from a child's height. Who it is not for: anyone wanting the history explained; the film assumes the background and never stops to fill it in.