Sidran: They Are Publicly Urging Me to Kick the Bucket and Get Off Their Backs!

Abdulah Sidran, academician, Sarajevo writer and screenwriter, received the “Milan Žmukić” award at the 28th film festival in Herceg Novi. The recognition is awarded by the festival and Centar film - Belgrade for contribution to the seventh art and affirmation of the event, and his interview was published in Belgrade's „Blic“, as reported by the Patria news agency.

Among other things, it is written that Abdulah Sidran signed the screenplays for the cult films of director Emir Kusturica, “Do You Remember Dolly Bell?” and “When Father Was Away on Business.” It was a tandem or a duo, as some called them, for wonders and for history. The war years of the 1990s brought disagreements, followed by overcoming tensions. Sidran also reflects on that part of his life.

- There is only one important thing: that his first two feature films, made from my screenplays, became an important and indisputable cultural-historical fact in the collective memory of most South Slavic peoples. The rest is private. And sadness - says Sidran about his relationship with Emir.

And what is most current in Sidran's professional life today?

- I am fighting. As if I were in my youngest days. I spent several years trying to expose the Sarajevo Cultural Clan. It is a powerful, perfectly organized war-profiteering group of bluffers and hypocrites that has been falsely presenting itself as the opposition for 20 years, while being embedded in every pore of the government, controlling financial flows, personnel policy, and holding all levers of decision-making not only in culture. They managed to steal from Bosnian writers the only important literary association, the international PEN Center of BiH, turning it into their private stash from which they operate like the ideological commission of some extinct Bolshevik party. Since they have no arguments to dispute my accusations, they are trying, twenty years after the war, to push me onto the bench for war criminals! With such monstrous accusations, they once drove Mirza Delibašić and Davorin Popović to death, and now they are publicly surprised that I am still alive and are publicly urging me to finally kick the bucket and get off their backs. Which, of course, is out of the question until I remove them from the sinecures and chairs they have been glued to for twenty years! - says Sidran in one breath.