The riotous new film from Emir Kusturica, the award winning director of Black Cat White Cat and Underground, is an irresistible blend of bawdy humour and love story, set against the turbulent backdrop of the Bosnian war of the early 90s. When the conflict breaks out, the life of mild mannered Serbian railwayman Luka is turned upside down as his neurotic opera-singing wife runs off with a musician and his son Milos is called up to fight and subsequently captured. A plan is hatched to exchange Milos for a hostage – a pretty young Muslim nurse, whom Luka is assigned to guard – but in the midst of the chaos around him, Luka finds he can’t help himself from falling in love with her. Filled with a wonderfully eccentric bunch of characters, marauding bears and lovesick donkeys, Kusturica’s vivid, life-affirming tragic-comedy bursts with invention and anarchic energy.

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