ALMIR IMŠIREVIĆ
Almir Imširević was born on March the 10th 1971 in Bihać, enrolled in the Academy of Performing Arts Sarajevo, and in 1998 he graduated from the Department of Dramaturgy. He is the author of the following plays: If This Were a Play . . ., Shame, the Balkan Devil, Circus Inferno, Based on a True Story, Mousefuckers, If This Were a Movie . . ., Fistik . . ., The Great, Muhammad Ali, the One and Only, plus two micro dramas, Playback Sevdalinka, and Ten Differences (the Only Thing That’s Real). His works have been produced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, France, Turkey, Poland, Kosovo, Italy, and the Czech Republic. Included as a playwright in the Twentieth Century Anthology of Bosnian and Herzegovinian Drama, he has served as a dramaturg as well on numerous plays for B&H theaters, and as a critic for Sarajevo-based magazines. He has published two books of short stories: Page 212 and The Most Beautiful of All Worlds, and the novel Golden Shrapnel. A part-time professor in the Department of Dramaturgy at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, Imširević is a project manager of the Dramadžiluk playwrights’ festival.
Photo by Velija Hasanbegović
Interview on DEPO PORTAL
Dina Ganibegović: How did "If This Were A Movie" come to be written and can you tell us something of what this play is about?
When I take a look at my notes now I can see that the sketch for the future script began surfacing long ago. It was seeking the right form, the right direction. Difficult work that took months, uninteresting for onlookers. In vain filmmakers try to "romanticize" the writer's craft and the very act of writing. There is no typewriter here, no strewn sheets of paper, overflowing ashtrays. So, to be brief, I don't know how it came to be written. It is a story about a Sarajevo family during the siege and an attempt of mine to prove that all happy families do not resemble one another after all.
Dina Ganibegović: Are the plays "If This Were a Play" and "If This Were a Film" linked? Is "If This Were a Film" a sort of sequel to the earlier hit play?
It is a sequel only in that every play of mine builds on the previous ones. There is, or so they say, an obsessive theme, something which can't be controlled, and which runs through almost all my writing. A skillful, attentive and sincere reader/viewer will easily see it. These two plays are linked by Sarajevo, the war . . . Almost 15 years passed between them. We are older, and it's only our disappointment that is relatively young. We are no longer waiting for the golden spoons they promised us. I have tried writing about that. I ended my first play with a curse. In this one I gave up on that.