In the end, both are right. Sometimes you need the brass band, the thieving gypsies, and the dead grandmother rising from the grave to assert that you exist. And sometimes, you need only to carve a single word into a tree and walk into the forest, knowing that the forest will remember you, even if the empire does not. Kusturica’s film is a celebration of the will to be seen. The Croatoan is a lesson in the power of not being found. One is a black cat; the other, a white one. Both are still walking.
Yet, Kusturica would recognize them. In one of the film’s most touching scenes, the young lovers Zare and Ida escape not in a luxury car, but in a rickety tractor pulling a trailer. They don’t fly; they crawl toward freedom. That tractor is the Croatoan. It is the slow, ugly, persistent vehicle of survival. The brass band plays for the wedding, but the tractor gets you home. Crna mačka, beli mačor is ultimately about the refusal to be a ghost. Emir Kusturica, as the CEO of his own joyful, chaotic empire, builds monuments of noise to prove that the Balkans—and by extension, all fractured peoples—are still alive. He offers the black cat of bad luck turning into the white cat of fortune. crna macka beli macor ceo filmcroatoan tribe today
But the Croatoan way is different. To be Croatoan today is to be a quiet footnote in history textbooks, a tribal identity that exists mostly in genealogical records and the tireless work of a few hundred descendants. In 2024, the Roanoke-Hatteras Algonquian Native American community continues to fight for recognition, not with brass bands and flying pigs, but with legal documents and archaeological evidence (such as the Elizabethan-era ring found near the Hatteras village of Buxton). Their CEO is not an auteur but a tribal council; their film is not a two-hour spectacle but a 400-year-long negotiation with erasure. In the end, both are right