Is Emir Kusturica's fascination with gypsies

Because he s a gypsie!

but every once in a blue moon, it's pretty common.

Many of his movies are about the life or from the life of gipsies. That`s because he grew up in a part of the city where majority of people were gipsies and it had major impact on his childhood and life in general. Many claim that he is one himself...

He is definitely not a Gypsy, although you'll find many Muslims from Sarajevo calling him 'Gypsy' as an insult because in their minds (as in the minds of other Europeans, especially eastern Europeans) being a Gypsy is something undesirable, filthy, and embarrassing. Bosnian Muslims hate Kusturica because they see him as a "traitor" for not supporting the official Muslim political and military line during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). He also freely talks about his Serbian roots (majority of the Muslims in Bosnia today are descendants of Serbs who converted to Islam during the Ottoman occupation), which is something most Muslims in Bosnia vehemently deny (at least in public) so they dislike him for that too......

Anyway, Kusturica was born and raised in Sarajevo, growing up in the neighbourhood called Gorica, which had a lot of Gypsies so that's probably the source of his fascination with the Gypsy lifestyle. I remember reading an interview of his where he talked about being very much in awe as a kid of the "freedom" with which Gypsy kids from his neighbourhood lived their lives: they didn't go to school, they smoked cigarettes, and they had sex at 11-12 years old.