A leading Bosnian-Herzegovinian director, he is welcome everywhere around the region. He claims that his Bosnia wasn’t formed militarily or politically, but rather was determined by culture, which is why his experience of directing in the Balkans is something that enriches him spiritually. He has put his name to more than a hundred directing jobs on multiple continents. He has also been successfully managing the Sarajevo National Theatre for the past four years.
He grew up in a family that gave him love and trust, and that taught him from an early age to respect others, and that he has a right to his own opinion.
“I fell seriously ill in the fifth year of primary school and spent three months quarantined at home. Until then, I had read the comics Zagor, Grande Blek and Comandante Marko, like other children… However, those comics weren’t enough for the speed at which I devoured them, and I was fated to explore the very rich bookshelf above the bed in which I was laying. I then also wanted to read something that came in sequels, in order to have something that would continuously kill my boredom and despair over not being with my pals at school. I recall well taking the thick two-volume War and Peace. In the gallery of characters is a hero called Pierre Bezukhov – an affable, rotund man, who spends his entire life unhappily in love. And his point of departure is the fact that he’s always done good to others, yet he’s never managed to find his moment of happiness, when he would assert himself fully. Throughout my later life and career, whenever I lost motivation or was overcome by some basic instincts, which would quickly make me feel ashamed, I always adjusted my behaviour through the perspective of Pierre Bezukhov, wondering how this childhood idol of mine would react in a given situation. Bezukhov represents a kind of paradigm of a utopian, who believes that you can only work for yourself if you believe you can change things by doing good for others. I found that in my vocation. I became a director, of theatre and film, someone who takes care to convey to his community ideas and dreams, and hope for a better and fairer world.”
Theatre only makes sense when it brings things into question, opens discussion and conducts dialogue, which is then most often considered subversive
His father, Mustafa, who was known as Pujdo to people from the film industry, was a director of photography, while his mother, Majda, retired as a bank clerk and his sister Svjetlana is a journalist. He spent an important part of his upbringing, during the first years of primary school, with his grandmother Milka and his grandfather Taib. That’s how he recalls the sound of Grandma Milka’s Singer sewing machine, her warm kitchen and the smell of hot cocoa that she would serve him before school in the mornings.
“Her powerful embrace before I left the house and headed to school was a ritual that often comes back to me through my dreams or on days when I feel insecure, sad or lost.”
Dino has long been the husband of Lejla, a comparatist and producer who works in the culture department of the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is also the father of a daughter, Iman, an economist. In raising and educating her, he tried to assure Iman that spiritual values such as truth, justice, beauty, compassion and love are the only real protection and the only assurance of freedom.
“They are the only things that can truly liberate us and bring out the best in human nature and overcoming our most base urges. That’s why it’s vital to preserve within us the importance of joy. The delight of learning, the idea that you should never stay on the surface or allow your habits to turn your life into some kind of intoxicating routine. The rapture of life enables you to experience massive spiritual and emotional richness in what life has to offer you.”
He graduated Sarajevo’s famous First Gymnasium secondary school, which has been attended by many artists, scientists and business leaders. One of them was Ivo Andrić himself. He subsequently graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, Department of Comparative Literature, and finally completed his studies at the Academy of Performing Arts with a degree in multimedia directing (film, theatre, TV and radio). We ask him why he says that directing was his only choice.
“I always remember a humorous answer to that question given by the great Avda Sidran, who said that a director has a gift for a little of everything. And that really is the case – a little bit of an actor, painter, scenographer or writer. A little bit of everything, and nothing fully. The director chooses and makes decisions, creates the whole, orchestrates the work, multiplies self and his idea in others, but he must then also invalidate himself in order to get the best and the most out of his other collaborators. This is a profession in which there’s no holding back – you give the best of yourself to others, like an intense wellspring that everyone must taste, and you mustn’t run dry.”
At the outbreak of the war in Bosnia, Dino was 21 years old.
“I was born in a city where it was completely natural for there to be a friendship between an Islamic mystic and a professor of Christology at the school of Catholic theology. That is still as normal for everyone today as it was in the past, as those who are related to Sarajevo in spirit affirm the peculiarities and values of all others, and embrace them as their own. And in Bosnia, as well as in Sarajevo, that was always more than that ‘three nations’, because it isn’t good for anybody when you divide and multiply by three. Those neighbourhoods that are called ‘raja’ in Sarajevo comprise not only Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, but also Jews, Slovenes, Albanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Romani and many others who live in the city; they are Sarajevo, where no one was left feeling confined. In short, the entire world of Sarajevo stands there… almost four-hundred thousand city atoms, as Aleksandar Hemon ingeniously described the city. Some of those atoms unfortunately didn’t survive the war, because they chose the right side of history when they defended the city, the right to the freedom to be different, and because of that Sarajevo – and if you like the whole of Bosnia – can only be loved, and that’s an idea for which it’s worth fighting. But there’s a significant number of those who still hate it equally because they don’t like to live together in the unity of diversity.”
Dino has for years had a simple explanation for the disintegration of Yugoslavia. He says that it was created by the best and destroyed by the worst.
“They spat on emancipation and regressed us back decades, into newly created states that haven’t surpassed the former Yugoslav community in terms of any parameter of quality of life even thirty years on. Thus, that country was destroyed by nationalists with their hegemonic policies in which Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the heart of that former country, wasn’t meant to survive, so they chopped it up according to an ethnic map drawn on a napkin from a luxury restaurant when they’d eaten their fill and belched between bites, with the authors of that sketch being Tuđman and Milošević.”
The nationalists of our region turned out to be the greatest opponents of their own nation and homeland
This director has remained inextricably linked to the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
“Yugoslavia wasn’t merely a political ideal, but rather a cultural utopia that lives on today. The cultural space really, truly exists, and is in productions and co-productions. The nationalist concept for the obliteration of Yugoslavia was also the concept for the obliteration of the Yugoslav cultural model. The demolition of all those cities that represented the civilisational substance of Yugoslavia, where the cultural and historical heritage was ruined. That was a barbaric war that was also led against Yugoslav culture. Sarajevo forged and created a cultural scene that had a strong association with Yugoslavia, and that legacy lives on today.”
That’s why there’s so much denial of the victory of anti-fascism in these lands, as one of the most precious battles won by Yugoslavia in World War II.
“All ethno-nationalisms are connected by their hatred of anti-fascist values, the partisan heritage and the idea of brotherhood and solidarity among the peoples of the former shared homeland of Yugoslavia. Those who present the comparative advantages of that time in comparison to the newly formed states in public continuously are most brutally attacked using the verbal arsenal of right-leaning media outlets and social network bots, such as the Yugo-Communists, Khmer Rouge etc.”
Celebrity journalists who are extreme right-wingers write about this with a passion and have no problem with other nationalists, with whom they even cooperate, while they have a civilisational conflict with anti-fascists, both living and dead. It is a tradition for them to trash partisan cemeteries, urinate on the monuments of partisan heroes, not allowing the remembrance – either material or spiritual – of the achievements of that war of liberation. They eliminate the names of streets, squares and institutions that were named after famous heroes of partisan resistance. And history teaches us that nationalism always flirts with racism, and even with religious radicalism, while denying human rights, women’s rights etc.
Those who don’t differentiate between patriotism and nationalism do so deliberately, because it turned out that the nationalists of our region were actually the greatest opponents of their own nation and homeland. We were robbed the most by people who were only ready on paper to die for their nation. That scum of society has the least respect for laws and has benefited the most from the nation and state that they swear an oath to hypocritically. As such, in order to preserve the freedoms that were won in blood in our shared history, anti-fascists must start promoting and developing civil society on a daily basis, defending human and individual rights.
He is among the few directors who are equally welcome in Sarajevo, Belgrade, Zagreb and Pristina… This is his spiritual space, with all his emotional and professional relationships having been built in those cities, as well as in some of the other cultural hubs of the Balkans.
“The Balkans represent an indelible fact that moulded me professionally. I have no reason to be overly proud or overly shy about my Balkan directorial horizon. The Balkans is the essence of multi-ethnicity and multifaith communities in Europe.”
Yugoslavia wasn’t merely a political ideal, but rather a cultural utopia that lives on today
The story of Dino’s first directing job is a special one. It was the play The Wall, which would mark him permanently as a director and a man, because the play was created during wartime, when the experience of togetherness, solidarity and resistance to violence, evil and destruction was an ethical postulate for him that was inseparable from theatrical aesthetics.
“From today’s perspective, that looks to some like viewing nostalgia, when art was as important as bread and water. I also remember that play for a theatrical curiosity. The décor of the large wooden panel wall was composed of disassembled coffins that we received from the funeral service as a form of sponsorship. In the then war-torn Sarajevo, lumber was priceless as a result of the harsh winters in the city without fuel sources, so the poster of the play The Wall, based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous book, remains as probably the only poster in the history of the theatre to carry the logo and signature of the then only possible sponsor: Pokop funeral services!”
After a break of 20-odd years, Dino shot his second feature film: The Pavilion, based on a script authored by Viktor Ivančić. When one reads the names of the screenwriters, collaborators, actors etc., it’s easy to conclude that this is a version of Yugoslavia in miniature.
“Men and women of later years, with the help of illegally acquired weapons, occupy the Pavilion, take the administration and medical staff hostage, and enter into a conflict with the forces of the existing order. However, the rebels succeed in turning this seemingly hopeless situation to their advantage because they attract media attention thanks to the hostage crisis occurring during an election year. The rebels thus manage to manipulate the political elite because their reactions are influenced significantly by the fact that elections are approaching, which is also the regional reality of pensioners’ existential status. The film will soon have its premiere and theatrical distribution, which I look forward to impatiently.”
It was on 27th March this year that the Belgrade Drama Theatre hosted the premiere staging of the play Birds of a Kind by Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad, directed by Dino Mustafić and staged in Serbian for the first time.
“It is rare in any drama that I’ve read in recent years to find such a true experience of catharsis as in Mouawad’s drama: not faltering and resisting history, its centrifugal movement that crushes a person, determines life. Wajdi Mouawad is a writer with the strength of ancient times, when the audiences cathartically watched tragedies and stories that had their essence in recent armed conflicts and their devastating impact on individuals and communities. That’s why I think this story of love, identity and history, of the relationship between two young lovers who come from the Jewish-Palestinian cultural plain, can be both interesting and exciting for our Balkan cultural and life experience.”
In his capacity as managing director of the Sarajevo National Theatre for the last four years, he has given this theatre much greater social, political and cultural potential than that of a mere venue that gathers audiences as exclusive consumers of culture.
“I think that we’ve established a value system, in terms of theatre activity, over these four years of my term… [We’ve established] that there’s no law of aesthetics that must be respected, rather that we should give ourselves to every journey as though it’s a new spiritual adventure. This is how fantastic artists develop, because I think one learns best through differences, contrasts and contradictions, the artistic dialectic, a constant artistic and human debate – not about what is right and wrong, rather a debate about one’s own question – where am I in all this, can I do something and, if so, how much? Thus, in my opinion, theatre is a parallel life as a journey into an internal, spiritual experiment.
History teaches us that nationalism always flirts with racism, and even with religious radicalism, while denying human rights, women’s rights etc.
“Regardless of how much they differ, both national theatres and the independent scene should be on the same side in the struggle against the general neoliberal, commercial trend in culture. I’m afraid that we’re seeing the establishing of a public scene that’s seeking its own ‘new values’, spiritual mannequins, phonies who behave narcissistically, for whom media coverage of their work is more important than the artistic essence. They accepted the new context of this time of loudness and sensation, of value relativism, in which everything made by friends is proclaimed in the media as a historic and ingenious masterpiece. That media shriek of self-aggrandisement is disgusting and addresses the public as though they are consumers who could care less whether they’re in a theatre or a shopping centre. Everything can be bought and sold. Artistic integrity is worthless, while subservience and conformity can be bought for a small price.
History teaches us that nationalism always flirts with racism, and even with religious radicalism, while denying human rights, women’s rights etc.
Theatre only makes sense when it brings things into question, opens discussion and conducts dialogue, which is then most often considered subversive. There are ever-fewer such authors on the regional theatre scene, because any authentic opinion must come into conflict with norms tolerance and decency.
Production is declining rapidly in the Balkans and there is a constantly reducing possibility that we will remember some plays as marking the history of theatre, because only those done differently and courageously are remembered. There are almost no such plays on many performance schedules, as there mustn’t be any social scandal or transgression that would upset the conservative or partocratic spirit.”