Between the lines with Balkan screen legend Branko Djuric, star of 2001’s Oscar winner No Man’s Land

Actors Branko Djuric and Zana Marjanovic during the filming of actress Angelina Jolie's directorial debut in Budapest In the Land of Blood & Honey. Reuters

Branko Djuric is a very busy man indeed. One of the biggest stars of the former Yugoslavia, he has found success as an actor, comedian, director, producer and as frontman of the rock band Bombaj Stampa, so were were pleased to get chance to catch up with him when he attended the Scene Club’s Dubai screening of 2001’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner No Man’s Land, in which Djuric stars as a Bosnian soldier trapped between Bosnian and Serbian lines with his Serbian counterpart during the country’s civil war.

I suggest to Djuric that there may be more similarities between the UAE and Bosnia than it first appears – both small, young countries with a large muslim population, albeit one created through the unification of several smaller entities and the other through the break up of a larger one – and ask him if there are similarities between the two countries’ fledgling film industries, or any lessons the UAE can take from Bosnia’s Oscar success, but it seems not: “Bosnia really doesn’t have a film industry,” he explains. “When we made this film it was the first Bosnian film ever, but in fact it was shot in Slovenia, financed in Slovenia, most of the crew were Slovenian, the cinematographer was Belgian. We’d actually planned to enter the film to the Oscars as a Slovenian film, but the Slovenian Film Foundation chose a different film for their Oscar nominee. It was only then that it struck us that since the director, the scriptwriter and I are all Bosnian, and we speak Bosnian in the movie, it qualified as Bosnian too. We went to the Bosnian government and asked if we could be their candidate. They said ‘sure – we don’t have anything else!’”

He adds: “It was so funny in LA at the Kodak Theatre when John Travolta said ‘and the Oscar goes to Bosnia.’ I couldn’t help thinking of that guy in Slovenia who decided it wasn’t good enough, and I was really happy for him!”

Djuric is a Slovenian resident himself these days having left Sarajevo a year into the war in 1993. In fact, he reveals that he had given up acting after he left his homeland, but No Man’s Land director Danis Tanovic managed to bring him in from the cold: “I was well known across the former Yugoslavia as a comedian, and Danis had actually written the script especially for me, based on his experiences of staying in Sarajevo all through the siege. He sent the script to me in Slovenia, and it was such a great story, I just didn’t feel I could turn it down.”

It seems Tanovic did Djuric a huge favour – the Oscar was followed by appearances in Hollywood blockbusters (most famously alongside Angelina Jolie in 2011’s In The Land of Blood and Honey) as well as a role in Channel 4 UK’s 2012 TV movie If We Dead Awaken, although the actor admits he prefers appearing in films closer to home, both in the former Yugoslavia and in Italy, where he works regularly now he’s in neighbouring Slovenia: “The Hollywood thing’s a bit strange,” he says. “On the Angelina Jolie film there was a guy on set whose whole job was to announce into his head set when she came on set. There was another guy whose job seemed to be sitting on a sofa counting something. I never worked out what he was counting.

“Plus, with Hollywood films there’s a lot of stereotyping. The roles I get offered are all KGB agents or Russian gangsters. I don’t like that. I’m an actor and I want to know more about my character than ‘he’s Russian and he’s bad,’ so I’ve only done a couple of Hollywood films, although there are plenty of offers since the Oscar. Even in the Italian films I’m usually cast as a tough guy, which is kind of weird as I’m best known as a comedian at home.”

No Man’s Land itself is a real gem of a film – it’s worth noting that Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s classic Amelie was among the Oscars competition it fought off . Tanovic’s script, despite playing out in the middle of a bloody civil war, had the audience in stitches throughout at the sheer ridiculousness of events unfolding on screen. This ability to find humour in the darkest corners of the human condition is evidently one that Djuric shares: “Before the war I was huge in Yugoslavia,” he says. “But now I’m an international star in six or seven countries. It’s great!” You suspect this ability to find humour in adversity is one that many of Djuric’s countrymen have had to develop over the years.