FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Emir Kustrurica - Do You Remember Dolly Bell 

The communist with the white hair and the ill-fitting suit addresses the audience with a grim face: "Comrades; the situation is very serious..." We are expecting a new five-year plan. During this committee meeting, however, the issue is that the young people in the youth club are to form a band. Commissioned by the spontaneous creativity committee. Now the camera pans to a festival area, somewhere outside Sarajevo in a poor Muslim neighbourhood. You can hear Italian pop hits. Then the credits: Do You Remember Dolly Bell. This is the beginning of Emir Kusturica's very first film from 1981, a coming-of-age story because it is about a boy's first tentative steps towards manhood. His name is Dino (Slavko Stimac) and he sings in a band. In keeping with the genre, Dino will now learn a lot about sexuality, love and family (because independence from parents is only possible in battle). Dino is a serious, sensitive boy growing up in Tito's Yugoslavia during the 60s. Along the way, we learn something about the post-Stalinist communist country of the 60s - and the 80s, because it is significant that Emir Kusturica's irreverent humour made it to the screen at all. Would such dialogue have been possible in the GDR? It may be doubted. The beauty of it is that Do You Remember Dolly Bell touches on universal themes, is moving and very charming! Even those who have never heard of Tito or the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia can find their way around here and identify with Dino. And incidentally, Do You Remember Dolly Bell is also about the effects of communist ideology on Dino, because it is about the fading of an era and the memories of it. The melancholy of memory.