The filmmaker as historian, above and below ground

When the Bosnian director Emir Kusturica's film Underground was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1995 a number of critics claimed that the film was propaganda for Milosevic's Serbia. Kusturica, in contrast, describes the f ilm as an obituary for the former Yugoslavia. This paper examines the way i n which Kusturica has used the metaphor of the Underground to shed a parodi c light on the official narrative of Yugoslav history and to offer its plac e a version of the nation's past that highlights the spirit of ordinary Yug oslavs as they toiled, however misguidedly, in the basement of the bunker o f state communism. I examine the foundation myths of Yugoslavia and argue t hat within the three sets of contemporary debates about ex-Yugoslavia and t he war. Kusturica's film most appropriately fits within a discourse on coll ective memory and the politics of remembering and forgetting.