Lordan Zafranović

Lordan Zafranović (born 11 February 1944) is a Croatian-Czech-Yugoslav film director. He was a major figure of the Prague Wave.

Lordan Zafranović was born in 1944 in Maslinica, island of Šolta, in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia. He spent the first two years of his life in the El Shatt refugee camp together with his mother Marija and his elder brother Zdenko. After the war, the family reunited with father Ivan and moved to Split, where younger brother Andrija was born. He graduated in ship-engineering from the Split Marine School in 1962 and continued with studies in literature and fine arts at the Split Pedagogical Academy (later University of Split) from 1963 to 1967.

Zafranović belongs to the Prague wave (sometimes also called Praška filmska škola), a generation of acclaimed Yugoslav directors who had studied at the Prague Film School (FAMU) around 1968. His peers were Rajko Grlić, Goran Marković, Goran Paskaljević, Srđan Karanović, and cameraman Predrag Pega Popović. A generation later, also director Emir Kusturica, cameraman Vilko Filač, and Lordan's younger brother, film editor Andrija Zafranović studied at FAMU. Lordan Zafranović started his film career as an amateur at Kino klub Split in 1961 at age 15. From 1965 onwards, he worked as a professional, entering FAMU in 1967 as an already mature author with festival experience and awards, namely for his seminal experimental short Poslije podne (Puška) (1968). He was awarded Master of International Amateur Film in 1966 and graduated in film directing as a master student of Academy Award winner Elmar Klos in 1971.

Lordan Zafranović's first feature films are 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. His best known work however is the cult film Occupation in 26 Pictures (1978), which he co-wrote, as his previous feature film, 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.[10] 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. It was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival and submitted as Yugoslavia's entry for the Academy Awards.[11] In Hollywood, the film was regarded as a favourite, if only the director agreed to shorten the scene of a brutal massacre in an autobus, the climax of the film.[12] Zafranović declined – and lost the Oscar. 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. In the mid-1980s Zafranović returned to more intimate themes, with films such as An Angel's Bite (1984) and Aloa: Festivity of the Whores (1988), notable for their psychological drama and erotics. He also directed numerous TV productions for Radio Television Belgrade and Radio Television Zagreb.

In his long and productive career, Zafranović succeeded in realizing his films without betraying his creative vision and professional ethos, against all odds. He has been praised as "one of the great masters of modernism" (Dina Iordanova), "one of the great masters of Yugoslav film", and "a Mediterranean classic whose films can be compared with those by Angelopoulos, Bertolucci or Liliana Cavani" (Ranko Munitić), whereas his enemies denounced him as a "regime's director" indulging in "manierism" (Nenad Polimac).[13] British-Bulgarian film researcher Dina Iordanova correctly states that his "main occupation has been to explore the pressures experienced by ordinary people under extreme historical circumstances. His films challenge the deepest foundations of nationalism and question the justification of historical violence."[14] As in the case of other authentic and free thinking Yugoslav directors, namely Dušan Makavejev or Želimir Žilnik, Zafranović's films often caused controversy. This culminated in his occupation with the crimes of the NDH and the Ustaše during World War II and his documentaries Jasenovac: The Cruelest Death Camp of All Times (1983) and Decline of the Century: The Testament of L.Z. (1993) about the war crimes trial against NDH Minister of Interior Andrija Artuković.[15][16][17] His rich and eminent opus is currently rediscovered throughout the former Yugoslavia and beyond, also in Croatia. As Jasna Nanut puts it, Lordan Zafranović's work as a whole awaits critical valorization as "an indispensable and essential part of Croat cinematography."[18]

Shortly before the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, Zafranović joined the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia in 1989 for a short period.[19] Franjo Tuđman, the future first President of the Republic of Croatia, attacked him because of his movie Jasenovac: The Cruelest Death Camp of All Times (Krv i pepeo Jasenovca, 1985). Soon after Croatia's Declaration of Independence, Tuđman denounced him as an "Enemy of the Croatian people". Zafranović was forced to leave the country. He took along his film on Artuković, which he finished in exile as a personal account on the reemergence of fascist ideology and violence in Croatia: His Decline of the Century: The Testament of L.Z. (1993) is, in the words of Dina Iordanova "a powerful indictment of past and present-day Croatian nationalism".[20] He settled in Prague and continued to work for Czech Television. More than a decade later, he returned to Zagreb to make his monumental TV series on Josip Broz Tito, Tito – the Last Witnesses of the Testament (2011), co-produced by Radio Television Zagreb.[21]

Currently, he is working on his film The Children of Kozara (Zlatni Rez 42 (Djeca Kozare)) (in post-production). The story is based on a script which he co-wrote with Arsen Diklić back in the late 1980s, on a young girl which is imprisoned in the Ustaša death camp of Jasenovac along with her two younger brothers, after being captured with her mother in the Kozara Offensive.[22] The story follows her struggle for survival and escape from hell with the support of people who are not ready to allow that perilous, inhuman circumstances make them forget their own humanity.