Sarajevo on film 1981 Yugoslavia
Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Sjecaš li se Dolly Bell)
Kusturica's debut — a 1960s Sarajevo coming-of-age film that won the Lion of the Future at Venice and introduced the director's lifelong city.
- Director
- Emir Kusturica
- Year
- 1981
- Language
- Serbo-Croatian
- Country
- Yugoslavia
- Genre
- drama, coming-of-age
Emir Kusturica’s feature debut, made when he was a 26-year-old graduate of the FAMU film school in Prague, is set in the Sarajevo of the early 1960s — the neighbourhood, the schoolyard, and the river of the director’s own adolescence. Dino, a high-schooler with ambitions above his station, is keeping three plates spinning: his hypnotised father (a party man undergoing treatment), a part-time variety-show performer called Dolly Bell with whom he is besotted, and his own schemes to pay for the pleasures of the era. The film is gentle, funny, and soaked in the specific textures of a working-class Sarajevo that would be gone within a decade.
It won the Lion of the Future (best debut) at the 1981 Venice Film Festival and launched the career that would culminate, four years later, in the Palme d’Or. It is also the purest early statement of Kusturica’s great subject: the private world of a Sarajevo family, observed with affection and a total refusal of nostalgia for the state that surrounds it.
For a visitor, it is the lightest possible entry point into the city on screen — no war, no politics as a subject, just a Sarajevo summer seen from the inside. The old town and the Habsburg avenues of the era are the same streets you will walk; the film shows them before the century’s second half turned.
Critical reception
Kusturica’s debut won the Lion of the Future for best first feature at the 1981 Venice Film Festival and collected the FIPRESCI Prize the same year. English-language critics who caught up with it later were near-unanimous, and it holds a 90% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Public reception and legacy
Kusturica’s debut is widely credited as the beginning of the “new Bosnian school of film”, and its signature line — “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” — entered regional popular culture. It holds a 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.5 IMDb rating from over 7,000 votes, and it was Yugoslavia’s entry for the 54th Academy Awards.
What the critics said
“a moving, charming film that weaves universal psychological themes with specific political ones”Read the review →
“Ideals are retained and growing up is never finished in Kusturica's droll, moving debut.”