Né à Belgrade en 1951 d’une mère tchèque et catholique et d’un père bosniaque et musulman, Enki Bilal a dynamité les frontières entre bande dessinée, cinéma et art contemporain. À quoi ressemble ? Quel rôle attribuer à son père, tailleur du maréchal Tito, qui l’abandonne quand il a cinq ans ? Tout s’est-il joué dans cet atroce voyage en train vers l’exil, à neuf ans, ou entre les murs de la forteresse dont l’enfant avait fait sa cour de récréation ? Quel est-il, ce "casting inconscient" qui a fait éclore ces femmes aux seins bleus, et qu’est-ce que cette "planétologie" dont il a fait sa cause ? De Goscinny à Ridley Scott, des cendres de l’ex-Yougoslavie au sable d’une plage de Thaïlande, ces entretiens livrent les clefs d’un univers fascinant.
Enki Bilal (born Enes Bilal) is a French comic book creator and film director.
Bilal was born in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, to a Czech mother, Ana, who came to Belgrade as child from Karlovy Vary, and a Bosnian Muslim father, Muhamed Hamo Bilal who had been Josip Broz Tito's tailor. When he was five years old, his father managed to take a trip and stay in Paris as a political émigré. Enki and the rest of the family followed him, four years later.
Enki Bilal has no sense of belonging to any ethnic group and religion, nor is he obsessed with soil and roots. He said in one interview: "I also feel Bosnian by my father's origin, a Serb by my place of birth and a Croat by my relationship with a certain friends, not to mention my other Czech half, who I am inherited from mother".
At age 14, he met René Goscinny and with his encouragement applied his talent to comics. He produced work for Goscinny's Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote in the 1970s, publishing his first story, Le Bol Maudit, in 1972.
In 1975, Bilal began working with script writer Pierre Christin on a series of dark and surreal tales, resulting in the body of work titled Légendes d'Aujourd'hui.
He is best known for the Nikopol trilogy (La Foire aux immortels, La Femme piège and Froid Équateur), which took more than a decade to complete. Bilal wrote the script and did the artwork. The final chapter, Froid Équateur, was chosen book of the year by the magazine Lire and is acknowledged by the inventor of chess boxing as the inspiration for the sport.
Quatre? (2007), the last book in the Hatzfeld tetralogy, deals with the breakup of Yugoslavia from a future viewpoint. The first installment came in 1998 in the shape of Le Sommeil du Monstre opening with the main character, Nike, remembering the war in a series of traumatic flashbacks.
In 2012, Bilal was featured in a solo exhibition at The Louvre. The exhibition, titled "The Ghosts of the Louvre", ran from 20 December 2012 to 18 March 2013. The exhibition was organized by Fabrice Douar, and featured a series of paintings of "Ghosts", done atop photographs that Bilal took of the Louvre's collection.