[4] He has competed at the Cannes Film Festival on five occasions and won the Palme d'Or twice (for When Father Was Away on Business and Underground), as well as the Best Director prize for Time of the Gypsies.

[10] Emir grew up as the only child of a Muslim secular family[11][12] in Sarajevo, the capital of PR Bosnia and Herzegovina, then a constituent republic within FPR Yugoslavia.

[18] Kusturica continued to make highly regarded films into the next decade, including his American debut, the absurdist comedy Arizona Dream (1993).

He won the Palme d'Or for his black comedy epic Underground (1995), based upon a scenario of Dušan Kovačević, a noted Serbian playwright.

[21] In a discussion with Levy, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said:I hope we share another point, which is – to be brutal – hatred of [director] Emir Kusturica.

[30] In June 2007, Kusturica directed the music video to Manu Chao's single "Rainin in Paradize", from the latter's La Radiolina album.

Andrej Nikolaidis, a Montenegrin writer and columnist, criticized Kusturica for appearing to agree with Slobodan Milošević's propaganda during the Bosnian War.

In the end, Nikolaidis was ordered to pay $6,490 to Kusturica for calling the famed director a "media star of Milosevic's war machinery".

[34] In the end Nikolaidis and the paper were fined 12,000 euros for breaking the code of journalism by calling Kusturica "stupid, ugly and corrupt" in the article.

[35] In October 2010, Kusturica withdrew from the jury of Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival after being publicly criticized and accused by Turkish director Semih Kaplanoğlu and Turkey's minister of culture Ertuğrul Günay over his alleged remarks and opinions about the Bosnian War.

[37] Turkish media reported that Kusturica repeatedly downplayed the number of people killed and the rape of Muslim women during the war.

[36] Public sentiment in Turkey and in Serbia was such that a couple of days after Kusturica left Turkey, there were unsubstantiated news reports by Serbian tabloids claiming that a mob of Turkish youths in Antalya physically assaulted Swiss actor Michael Neuenschwander (in town to promote his movie 180° – Wenn deine Welt plötzlich Kopf steht) because they mistook him for Kusturica due to apparent physical resemblances between the two.

[42] During the last months of 2013, Kusturica started shooting a documentary on the life of Uruguayan president José Mujica, whom he considers "the last hero of politics".

In mid-1986, thirty-one-year-old Kusturica started playing bass guitar in Zabranjeno Pušenje,[48] a Sarajevan punk/garage rock outfit and part of the New Primitivism movement.

[citation needed] Kusturica, an already established and celebrated Palm d'Or-winning film director, joined the band just after Zabranjeno Pušenje frontman Nele Karajlić had caused a media scandal[49] that led to his legal prosecution on the verbal offence grounds and the band being shadow banned in the Yugoslav media, all of which hurt its commercial prospects and led to three of the six members leaving the group.

Though never fully involved in the band's day-to-day activities, Kusturica left Zabranjeno Pušenje in 1988 once the filming of Time of the Gypsies began.

Kusturica's autobiography, Death is an Unverified Rumour (Смрт је непровјерена гласина / Smrt je neprovjerena glasina), was published in October 2010 in Belgrade by Novosti.

The launch took place on 26 October during the Belgrade Book Fair and was attended by Nele Karajlić, Dušan Kovačević, foreign minister Vuk Jeremić, Vojislav Koštunica, etc.

[60] In 2012, the book was published in Bulgaria as Cмъpттa e нeпoтвъpдeн cлуx, in Greece as Κι εγώ πού είμαι σ' αυτή την ιστορία;, in Romania as Unde sunt eu în toată povestea asta, and in Hungary as Hogy jövök én a képbe?.

Kusturica's second book was a novel, Hundred Pains (Сто јада / Sto jada), released in Serbia on 24 April 2013 by Novosti a.d.[57][61] in the initial printing of 35,000 copies.

The initial idea came five years earlier in 2002 from Kusturica's collaborator Marc di Domenico while the support of the Paris Opera director Gerard Mortier got the project rolling.

Basing the production on his eponymous 1988 film, Kusturica wrote the libretto by adapting the story of the Gypsy youth from the Balkans relocating to Italy in order to obtain money for his ill sister's surgery.

The reverence Kusturica enjoys in the film circles along with his professional and personal contacts ensure the arrival of top guests from the European and world cinema every year.

The festival hosted global stars Johnny Depp and Monica Bellucci along with Nikita Mikhalkov, Gael García Bernal, Abel Ferrara, Kim Ki-duk, Audrey Tautou, etc.

On 28 June 2011 Kusturica started the construction project of Andrićgrad (also known as Kamengrad, meaning Stone Town), located in Višegrad, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was scheduled to be completed by 2014.

On Đurđevdan (St. George's Day) in 2005, he was baptised into the Serbian Orthodox Church as Nemanja Kusturica (Немања Кустурица) at the Savina monastery near Herceg Novi, Montenegro.

[76] When his mother was on her deathbed he wanted to find out his ancestry and learnt that the origin of the Kusturica family stemmed from two Orthodox Christian branches.

[83] According to Savo Pujić, an ancestor was Hajdarbeg Kusturica who was a čauš (officer) who lived in Volujak and was said to have been fair, having repurchased Muslim slaves, protected Orthodox clergy and his subject peasants.

[citation needed] At the 2007 parliamentary elections, he gave indirect support to Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and his center-right Democratic Party of Serbia.

[86] In 2009, Kusturica signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski following his arrest in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects.