Our 50 Years Award laureate Živko Zalar has been on film sets for 62 years. He started acting as a 10-year-old and he spent lots of time of the film sets where his father worked as a cameraman. Then he joins Kinoklub Zagreb as a film amateur. After that he enrolls the acclaimed FAMU film school in Prague and studies cinematography there. “An actress once complained on the set that I didn’t do my job well because she looked ugly on the screen. But such was her role”, Zalar illustrated his approach in the conversation with MFF director Igor Mirković. In Prague he met three directors that he would later cooperate with for years – Rajko Grlić, Srđan Karanović and Goran Marković. After the studies he got a job as a TV cameraman. He photographed his first feature film the year after that. In his career he made around thirty films (almost one hundred, if we count TV films). Most of his career he spent working in Germany, but he also worked in other countries. “Working on a film is about solving problems. Some people like solving crosswords and I like solving cinematic problems,” explains Zalar. He says he has been watching two years every day in the past 15 years. At the festival we saw Reflections, a film directed by Goran Marković and photographed by Živko Zalar. It is a horror movie, but also a social drama describing the period it was made in.
“An actress once complained on the set that I didn’t do my job well because she looked ugly on the screen. But such was her role”, Zalar illustrated his approach in the conversation with MFF director Igor Mirković. In Prague he met three directors that he would later cooperate with for years – Rajko Grlić, Srđan Karanović and Goran Marković. After the studies he got a job as a TV cameraman. He photographed his first feature film the year after that. In his career he made around thirty films (almost one hundred, if we count TV films). Most of his career he spent working in Germany, but he also worked in other countries.
“Working on a film is about solving problems. Some people like solving crosswords and I like solving cinematic problems,” explains Zalar. He says he has been watching two years every day in the past 15 years.
At the festival we saw Reflections, a film directed by Goran Marković and photographed by Živko Zalar. It is a horror movie, but also a social drama describing the period it was made in.
