Finding The Tragedy in The Absurd: Talking Emir Kusturica's 'Arizona Dream' and 'Underground' [Over/Under Movies Podcast]

Welcome to another edition of Over/Under Movies, the podcast in which we choose one overrated film and one underrated film — similar in tone, genre, style, or however we may see fit — and we discuss them.

This is an episode where we chuck the overrated pick and talk about a director we find to be underrated. The focus is on Emir Kusturica, the Serbian director who was hailed in Europe during the 90s to be Fellini’s second-coming but didn’t get much attention stateside. He managed to find a fascinating tonal meeting point between over-the-top absurdism and grounded tragedy.

Co-host Oktay Ege Kozak’s picks for this episode include two of Kusturica’s back-to-back 90s efforts. We begin with “Arizona Dream,” an R-rated coming-of-age fable about a group of dreamers who gradually lose their thread to reality. Next up is “Underground,” Kusturica’s highly controversial Palme D’Or winner, a dream-like war epic about the fall of Yugoslavia, wrapped around the lives of two cartoonishly narcissistic arms dealers. Andy Crump joins Oktay on this episode, and a special thanks goes to Ryan Oliver for editing it.

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