Name: When Father Was Away on Business
Director: Emir Kusturica
Genre: Drama
Released: 1985
Duration: 136 min
Rating: 7.7

When Father Was Away on Business (1985) · Cinespective

Meaning, unpacked

Central idea

The film explores how political power invades private life, and how a child absorbs history without understanding it. It can be read as a portrait of a society in which loyalty, love and betrayal are all tangled up with the state.

What it means, and why it matteredA careless remark about a political cartoon is all it takes. A father is taken away, and a family in Sarajevo tells the children he is simply away on business. You watch it through the eyes of a small boy, Malik, who half-hears, misreads and imagines. The film's central idea is that political power invades private life, and that a child absorbs history without understanding it. Suspicion travels through relatives, colleagues and lovers, so the political and the personal cannot be pulled apart.

What it means

A careless remark about a political cartoon is all it takes. A father is taken away, and a family in Sarajevo tells the children he is simply away on business. You watch it through the eyes of a small boy, Malik, who half-hears, misreads and imagines. The film's central idea is that political power invades private life, and that a child absorbs history without understanding it. Suspicion travels through relatives, colleagues and lovers, so the political and the personal cannot be pulled apart.

The film cares less about heroes and villains than about the small accommodations people make to stay safe. The family is both shelter and trap: it protects the boy, and it also controls him. Because we often see adult scenes Malik could never have witnessed, you understand more than he does, and that gap is where the feeling lives. The sleepwalking suggests a remembered story rather than a documented one. Perhaps that is the last lesson: children are told a gentle story to shield them, and they carry it for life.

Why it mattered

In 1985 the film premiered at Cannes and won the Palme d'Or, an unusual honour for a Yugoslav production. It also earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It looked back at the Tito-Stalin split and its informers and punishments while Yugoslavia still existed, a subject only just becoming open to public treatment.

After watching