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San Francisco International Film Festival

Saturday, April 24, 1999
Black Cat, White Cat
Emir Kusturica France, 1998

(Chat noir, chat blanc). Emir Kusturica conjures up another outrageous, sprawling epic after his Cannes prize-winning Underground. He returns to the world of Gypsy life on the Danube, again filming largely with nonprofessional actors. A fable of two patriarchs and their feuding families, the larger-than-life tale combines a high-energy crime caper with some intricate shenanigans surrounding an arranged Gypsy wedding. Overflowing with bizarre images like car-eating pigs, ice-packed corpses, and living tree stumps, the film blends the surreal and the real. This is an intensely physical, slapstick black comedy-the kind of thing the Marx Brothers might have cooked up had they been imbued with a more morbid and outré taste for catastrophe.-Joel Shepard

• Written by Gordon Mihic, Kusturica. Photographed by Thierry Arbogast, Michel Amathieu. With Bajram Severdzan, Florijan Ajdini, Jasar Destani, Adnan Bekir. (135 mins [corr: 126 mins])