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As Sally Potter travels around the world with 'YES'
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Mexico

The Critic

The Rivera Murals

The Casa Azul

Jet-lag

Festival Screening

The Trotsky Museum

Exile

Profound Mexico

Hope

Rain on canvas

The Jury

The Anthropological Museum

Time

Political Correctness

Two Houses

False Virtue

Life is a miracle

Weird Roots

The Meeting

Turtles Can Fly

The Oscars

Luis Barragans house

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Life is a miracle

Emir Kusturica has arrived in town, with his band, the ‘No Smoking Orchestra’.  They are in the hotel lobby at breakfast, looking suitably disheveled, jet-lagged, and smoking like chimneys.  That night we go to their sold-out concert after seeing his film, ‘Life is a Miracle’: which is an exuberant, funny, satire about war deeply embedded in its Serbian roots; wild and full of surprises, with the most astonishing football sequence I have ever seen on film (except, perhaps, for that in Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece, ‘This Sporting Life’). 

The concert is anarchistic, confident, a celebration of male playful-ness (“young ladies” are invited onto the stage to dance from time to time).  The audience loves it, waving their hands in the air, clapping, hooting, cheering.  And I love it, too, though I sit quietly watching, as, I note out of the corner of my eye, does Todd Solonz (who is showing ‘Palindromes’ at the festival).  We are directors watching another director perform.  Another solution to the problem of the promotional tour: invite your friends, make music, acknowledge that promoting your film is a performance.  But Emir on stage is a relatively quiet presence; while the others leap about, twirl their guitars, clown and laugh, he plays his guitar and watches.  A director can never lose his eye, even on stage.

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At the concert



Text © Sally Potter. All pictures © Adventure Pictures unless otherwise indicated