A Bosnian Roma couple re-enact their personal struggle to get treatment after their baby died in the womb, in a tiny-budget movie by an Oscar-winning director that’s competing for the top prize at the Berlin film festival.
Director Danis Tanovic discovered the story of the couple, Senada Alimanovic and Nazif Mujic, in a newspaper in late 2011. He says he went to meet the family several times and had the “crazy idea” of having the couple play themselves to avoid a long planning process.
Tanovic made the movie, “An Episode In the Life of an Iron Picker,” with €17,000 ($23,000) from a Bosnian film fund. It has its premiere Wednesday at the Berlin festival, where it’s one of 17 movies competing for the Golden Bear award.
The movie re-creates several days in which Mujic, who tried to make ends meet at the time by collecting scrap metal, fought to get emergency treatment for Alimanovic after her baby died while she was still carrying it.
The couple didn’t have public health insurance, and a hospital denied them the surgery when they were unable to meet its demands to pay €500 — a huge sum for them. Roma, also known as Gypsies, suffer from poverty and discrimination across Europe, particularly in the continent’s east.
“They were reluctant at first” to play themselves in the movie, said Tanovic, whose “No Man’s Land” won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2002. “They were a little bit afraid to tell the story. They didn’t know me, they didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
He said their story is “deeply disturbing and unfair, (and) I think the best way for me to fight these things is to show them, to talk about them.”
Tanovic worked without a screenplay and the film features no professional actors; two doctors, one who refused to treat Alimanovic and another who did treat her, are played by other doctors who are friends of the director.
Mujic said he still has no regular job or health insurance and is “living from hand to mouth,” though he’s now involved with an organization that seeks to improve Gypsy children’s education — but, with the film project under way, he was able to get gall bladder treatment last year.
He was joined at the Berlin festival by Alimanovic.
“It was painful,” she said of the episode the film depicts. “I don’t want anyone else to experience what I had to experience.”
“Mickey 17” Tops Weekend Box Office, But Profitability Is A Long Way Off
"Parasite" filmmaker Bong Joon Ho's original science fiction film "Mickey 17" opened in first place on the North American box office charts. According to studio estimates Sunday, the Robert Pattinson-led film earned $19.1 million in its first weekend in theaters, which was enough to dethrone "Captain America: Brave New World" after a three-week reign.
Overseas, "Mickey 17" has already made $34.2 million, bringing its worldwide total to $53.3 million. But profitability for the film is a long way off: It cost a reported $118 million to produce, which does not account for millions spent on marketing and promotion.
A week following the Oscars, where "Anora" filmmaker Sean Baker made an impassioned speech about the importance of the theatrical experience – for filmmakers to keep making movies for the big screens, for distributors to focus on theatrical releases and for audiences to keep going – "Mickey 17" is perhaps the perfect representation of this moment in the business, or at least an interesting case study. It's an original film from an Oscar-winning director led by a big star that was afforded a blockbuster budget and given a robust theatrical release by Warner Bros., one of the few major studios remaining. But despite all of that, and reviews that were mostly positive (79% on RottenTomatoes), audiences did not treat it as an event movie, and it may ultimately struggle to break even.
Originally set for release in March 2024, Bong Joon Ho's follow-up to the Oscar-winning "Parasite" faced several delays, which he has attributed to extenuating circumstances around the Hollywood strikes. Based on the novel "Mickey7" by Edward Ashton, Pattinson plays an expendable employee who dies on missions and is re-printed time and time again. Steven... Read More