Zvonimir Jurić

Zvonimir Jurić was born in Osijek, where he completed elementary and high school. During the 80’s, while still a teenager, he played minor characters in a number of TV series produced by TV Zagreb. Upon graduating from high school, Jurić went on to study film directing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for a year. In 1992, he returned to Zagreb and enrolled in the film directing program at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb.

During his studies, he directed several short films and documentaries, including The Sky Below Osijek, which won the Oktavijan and Critics’s Award for best film at the Croatian Film Days festival. He won the Rector's Award for his short graduation film Die, Die My Darling. Towards the end of the 90’s, he filmed his first professional documentaries at Factum - Jurić: Fortress 1999 and The Blacks Have Endured, and I?, in which he continues to variously explore his hometown.

In 2003, he films his first feature film The One Who Will Stay Unnoticed. In 2009, together with Goran Dević, he writes and directs The Blacks, a psychological war drama about a Croatian military unit that refuses to lay down its arms following the end of the Croatian War of Independence. The film won Jurić and Dević the Golden Arena for Best Director at the 2009 Pula Film Festival. His short film Yellow Moon premiered as an official selection of the Berlin Film Festival and went on to win several awards at prestigious film festivals worldwide.