When Father Was Away on Business
| When Father Was Away on Business | |
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| Directed by | Emir Kusturica |
| Produced by | Mirza Pašić |
| Written by | Abdulah Sidran |
| Starring |
Moreno De Bartoli Miki Manojlović Mirjana Karanović Mustafa Nadarević Mira Furlan Davor Dujmović Predrag Laković Pavle Vujisić |
| Music by | Zoran Simjanović |
| Cinematography | Vilko Filač |
| Edited by | Andrija Zafranović |
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Production
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| Distributed by |
Scotia International Filmverleih (1985) (West Germany) Cannon Film Distributors (USA) (subtitled) Hollydan Works (2007-2008) (Non-US) Koch Lorber Films (2005) (USA) |
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Release date
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Running time
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136 minutes |
| Country | Yugoslavia |
| Language | Serbo-Croatian |
| Box office | $25,053 (West Germany only) $16,131 (USA only) |
When Father Was Away on Business (Serbo-Croatian: Otac na službenom putu/Отац на службеном путу) is a 1985 Yugoslav film by director Emir Kusturica. The screenplay was written by the Bosnian dramatist Abdulah Sidran. Its subtitle is A Historical Love Film and it was produced by Centar Film and Forum, production companies based in Sarajevo.
Set in post-World War II Yugoslavia during the Informbiro period, the film tells the story through the eyes of the young boy Malik. His father, communist functionary Meša (played by Miki Manojlović), has been sent to a labour camp by his own brother-in-law (his wife Sena's brother) Zijo who's an even higher positioned Communist functionary for making a remark about a political cartoon regarding the Tito–Stalin Split in the Politika newspaper.
The movie opens in June 1950 with a local neighbourhood drunk Čika Franjo serenading field workers. He sings Mexican songs (as it turns out, he does so out of self-preservation, figuring it's safer for him to steer clear of songs originating from either of the two dominant global powers — United States and Soviet Union — in the current climate of Cold War and Yugoslavia's paranoid repressive internal apparatus looking to identify and remove enemies of the state in the wake of the Tito–Stalin Split) while local children, including Malik, climb trees and play around. The story is from the perspective of the boy, Malik, whose mother Sena tells him that his father is on a business trip. Malik is a chronic sleepwalker.
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Wikipedia