Zagreb on film: the Zagreb School, Fiddler on the Roof and Branko Lustig

The Zagreb School and an Oscar

At Zagreb Film, artists of the 1950s and 1960s created a bold, witty style of animation known around the world as the Zagreb School. In 1962 Dušan Vukotić’s Ersatz (Surogat) became the first animated film made outside the United States to win the Academy Award for best animated short. Zagreb Film has put the whole film online, and it still makes audiences laugh.

Animafest Zagreb, founded in 1972, carries the tradition on every June, and the Zagreb Film Festival brings new international cinema to the city in the autumn.

The Zagreb School of Animated Film →   Animafest Zagreb →   Zagreb Film Festival →   Kinoteka →

Fiddler on the Roof, Branko Lustig and Hollywood near Zagreb

Norman Jewison filmed Fiddler on the Roof (1971) in Croatia: the village of Anatevka was built in the countryside at Lekenik and Mala Gorica, south of Zagreb, and the film’s closing credits thank their residents and the city of Zagreb. The producer Branko Lustig, born in Osijek in 1932 and a survivor of Auschwitz, worked on many of the foreign productions made in Croatia, and later won two Oscars for best picture, for Schindler’s List and Gladiator.

Rajko Grlić, Vinko Brešan and Goran Bogdan

Rajko Grlić, one of the Prague School directors, set his comedy The Constitution (2016) in a Zagreb apartment block; it won the Grand Prize of the Americas at the Montreal World Film Festival. Vinko Brešan’s The Priest’s Children (2013), set on a Dalmatian island, is one of the best-loved dark comedies of recent years, and the actor Goran Bogdan has carried Croatian talent to American television in Fargo.

Balkan Cinema: our long read on the ULTIMATE Regions guide →