but he’d managed to turn some semi-functional machinery into a private studio of his own. The film’s editing was patchy, but at least the price was right.

With a completed film, we now had the final hurdle: smuggling the product through the military and border customs into an enemy country.

Two blondes in miniskirts, with two underage kids, jumped into a car full of Walt Disney cartoons. They pretended to be heading to Budapest for a “visa arrangement.” One of the Disney films was my diary film. The customs officers were too lazy to screen a whole bunch of kids’ cartoons.

So my film and I ended up at the Venice film Jasmina Tesanovic’s online journal, Diary festival, together with Antonio Banderas, Melanie ^{of a Political Idiot, became the basis of an} Griffith, Nicole Kidman, and Tom Cruise. ^{autobiographical documentary and a} _{book, published by Cleis Press in 2000.}

Eventually, my film, dubbed into German and titled Jasmina’s Diary, was shown to 1.5 million TV-watching Germans. It still airs, every once in a while, in various corners of the world.

In 1999 Granta 67 published an excerpt of Tesanovic’s The Diary of a Political Idiot. You can read it online at granta.com/extracts/494.

Jasmina Tesanovic is a writer and filmmaker from Belgrade, Serbia.