Berlin ‘Best Actor’ living in German asylum-seekers home

A YEAR ago Bosnian amateur actor Nazif Mujic walked the red carpet of the Berlin film festival as the winner of the Best Actor award, the prestigious Silver Bear.
Today he languishes with his wife and their three children in an asylum-seekers home on the edge of the German capital, awaiting deportation.
His tobacco-stained fingers caress the statuette and a smile crosses his gap-toothed face, as his tattooed wife reclines tired on the couch, smiling at the prestigious trophy.
At their feet, two children play on a threadbare carpet and briefly avert their attention from a plastic truck to also admire the Silver Bear.
It was last February when Mujic, from the Roma minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for the first time appeared before Hollywood stars and TV cameras.
Celebrated for playing himself in a drama about discrimination against Roma, Mujic, then wearing an elegant tie under his gaunt face, discovered a world of champagne flutes, salmon canapes and five-star hotels.
Today, he lives with other Roma and refugees from war-torn countries in a former nursing home turned center for asylum-seekers, about 20 kms from the futuristic Potsdamer Platz which will soon host the next edition of the Berlin Film Festival.
Mujic, who previously gathered scrap metal in a remote northern village of Bosnia, says he will leave Germany by Feb. 25 after his application for asylum was rejected.
Until then, “it’s always better to be here than be in Bosnia,” says his wife, Senada Alimanovic, 33, who starred with him in the 2013 film “An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker.”
Director Danis Tanovic, an Oscar winner for his 2002 war film “No Man’s Land,” asked the couple to replay their own real-life ordeal, filming it over nine days with a hand-held digital camera and no screenplay.
In the movie, while the husband and other family members scavenge for steel and copper they can sell for a pittance, Senada suffers a complex and dangerous miscarriage.
The story recounts their desperate battle, trapped in a world of poverty and discrimination, to get her medical treatment. In the end she is saved in the nick of time.
The film also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale 2013.
Today the family’s home is a cramped studio with a double bed, two large sofas, a television set and a cooking stove, a place where children sit bored on the stairways.
“I never want to return to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over there there was barely enough to eat and nothing to raise our children with,” said the 43-year-old Mujic.
After the Berlinale, he received a hero’s welcome in his home village, where a ramshackle house awaited him, similar to those of about 22,000 Roma in Bosnia, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Mujic, a veteran of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, hoped his cinema success would open new horizons and lead to follow-up acting work, but no offers came while he suffered from serious back problems and diabetes, he said.
So last November, he decided to return to the city where he had risen to fame.
A 250-euro ($340) bus ticket bought him and his family a 24-hour ride to their destination, where a new disappointment awaited. Living in Berlin with his brother and his 19-year-old son from his first marriage, Mujic saw his family’s asylum application refused.
The Berlinale is now trying to help Mujic by offering him the services of a lawyer to investigate his case, a festival spokesman told AFP.