Lordan Zafranović

Lordan Zafranović
Lordan Zafranović watching his movie Zalazak stoljeća. University of Basel, October 2016.
Born	(1944-02-11) 11 February 1944 (age 72) Maslinica, Šolta, (Croatia)
Years active	1961 – present
Awards	Cannes Palme d'Or Nominated 1979 Occupation in 26 Pictures Big Golden Arena for Best Film 1978 Occupation in 26 Pictures 1981 The Fall of Italy Golden Arena for Best Director 1986 Evening Bells

Lordan Zafranović (born 11 February 1944) is a Czech-Croatian film director, and a major figure of the Yugoslav Black Wave. He lives in Prague and in Zagreb.

Zafranović first engaged in making films as a 16-year-old teenager in his hometown Split. A member of the Kino klub Split, he did a series of experimental shorts, such as Poslije podne (Puška) (1968), which won him first awards as an amateur filmer. After receiving a degree in literature and visual arts at the University of Split, he was awarded a scholarship at the famous FAMU in Prague in 1968. He graduated in film directing as a master student of Elmar Klos in 1971. The films that marked the beginning of his regular feature filmmaking were Sunday (1969), with Goran Marković in the leading role, and Passion According to Matthew (1975), which earned him the critics' award at the Pula Film Festival.

Zafranović belongs to the so-called Prague School, a group of acclaimed Yugoslav directors of the 1970s and 1980s who all had studied there, his peers being Rajko Grlić, Goran Marković, Goran Paskaljević, Srđan Karanović, and, a few years later, Emir Kusturica.

His most important work is the cult film Occupation in 26 Pictures (1978), which he co-wrote with acclaimed writer Mirko Kovač. The film reinvented the genre of the Yugoslav Partisan film with its lush Mediterranean setting of Dubrovnik and its aesthetics, contrasting the happiness of an affluent aristocratic family and her friends with the arrival of evil, through fascist occupation and violence, and the collapse of morale and society. The film was a huge box office hit in Yugoslavia and in Czechoslovakia. It won the Big Golden Arena for Best Picture at the Pula Film Festival, and was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival and submitted as Yugoslavia's entry for the Academy Awards. He continued his WWII trilogy with The Fall of Italy (1981), set in his native island Šolta during the Italian occupation, which evolves around the rise and fall of a young Partisan officer who is corrupted by power, and Evening Bells (1986), also co-written with Mirko Kovač, which tells the life of a village lad (played by Rade Šerbedžija) who went to the city and became a Partisan, and who then ended up first in internment in Nazi Germany and second, after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, in a Yugoslav prison. The Fall of Italy won him the Big Golden Arena for the second time, Evening Bells the Golden Arena for Best Director at the Pula Film Festival.