What does the Croatoan have to do with Black Cat, White Cat ? Everything. The Croatoan represents the opposite of Kusturica’s “CEO” model. Where Kusturica builds a distinct, branded, loud aesthetic to resist erasure, the Croatoan survived by erasing the brand . There is no “Croatoan” film festival, no tourist village built in their likeness. Instead, their survival is in the DNA, in the surnames (like “Berry” or “Gibbs”), in the oral traditions of the Hatteras community. They are the white cat to Kusturica’s black cat: quiet, integrated, and invisible to the grand historical narrative. The brilliance of Crna mačka, beli mačor is that it acknowledges both strategies. The film’s hero is not the slick gangster Dadan, but the elderly Grga Pitić, who fakes his own death and then returns. His return is not a haunting; it is a punchline. Kusturica argues that the dead do not disappear; they get back in the game. The grandmother’s resurrection is not spiritual; it is practical. She wants her gold. This is the Balkan way: scream until you are heard.
In the pantheon of world cinema, few films capture the raw, anarchic joy of survival as vividly as Emir Kusturica’s 1998 masterpiece, Crna mačka, beli mačor (Black Cat, White Cat). Set on the banks of the Danube, the film is a whirlwind of brass bands, pig-eating weddings, gangster farce, and a love story that triumphantly transcends greed. To analyze this film is to analyze the methodology of its creator. Kusturica is not merely a director; he is the undisputed CEO of his own cinematic universe—a hyperkinetic, Balkan-specific, yet universally resonant corporation of chaos. This essay argues that the film’s enduring power lies in its dialectical relationship with loss. While Kusturica, as CEO, builds a noisy fortress against oblivion, a parallel historical ghost—the lost English colony of Roanoke and its mysterious word “Croatoan”—offers a chilling counter-narrative. The modern fate of the Croatoan tribe (the present-day Hatteras Indians) reveals that survival is not always loud; sometimes, it is a quiet, resilient absorption into a new world, a mirror opposite of Kusturica’s exuberant spectacle. Part I: Kusturica as CEO – The Auteur as Corporate Architect To understand Crna mačka, beli mačor , one must first understand the business model of Emir Kusturica. A CEO is defined not by doing every job, but by orchestrating a distinctive, profitable, and replicable brand. Kusturica’s brand is “Gypsy punk” surrealism—a manic aesthetic involving live music, non-professional actors, animals, and gravity-defying physical comedy. As CEO, he has built an infrastructure: the Küstendorf film festival and his own village in Drvengrad, Serbia, a physical manifestation of his artistic values. crna macka beli macor ceo filmcroatoan tribe today
However, this corporate lens reveals a paradox. The CEO of chaos builds to stave off meaninglessness. Kusturica, a Bosnian-born director who lived through the Yugoslav Wars, constructs these frantic films as a deliberate antidote to ethnic cleansing and nihilism. The film’s title— Black Cat, White Cat —references a Romani saying about bad luck turning to good. Under Kusturica’s management, even bad luck is a marketable asset. To juxtapose Kusturica’s noisy, constructed world, consider the quietest mystery in American history: the Lost Colony of Roanoke (1587). When Governor John White returned after a three-year delay, he found the settlement deserted. The only clue was the word “Croatoan” carved into a post. “Cro” for “Croatian”? A linguistic trick of history. But in fact, Croatoan (also spelled Hatteras) was the name of a Native American tribe inhabiting the Outer Banks of modern-day North Carolina. What does the Croatoan have to do with Black Cat, White Cat
In Black Cat, White Cat , the CEO’s vision is total. The plot—involving the hapless Matko, the swindling Dadan, and a dead grandmother who rises to reclaim her wedding gold—is secondary to the system of the film. Kusturica directs with the efficiency of a COO managing supply chains: the supply of absurdist gags (a man shitting on the floor during a deal), the supply of live brass music (Boban Marković’s orchestra), and the supply of romantic transcendence (the lovers Zare and Ida escaping in a yellow tractor). The film’s famous final image, where the wedding party floats away on a barge as the tree where Grga Pitić is hanging uproots itself and floats after them, is pure CEO logic: when the product (life) is in motion, even death cannot stop the party. Where Kusturica builds a distinct, branded, loud aesthetic
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.
The modern descendants of the Croatoan tribe offer a different lesson. They are the word carved into a post—not a film, not a brand, but a clue. Their existence today is not celebrated in international film festivals. It is found in the tidal creeks of Hatteras Island, in the mitochondrial DNA of families who know they were there before “Virginia” was a name. They survived not by being the CEO, but by being the silent partner in history’s brutal merger.