Ognjen Sviličić

Sviličić was born 1971 in Split, in a family of journalists.[1] He started his career with a series of TV features which had a mixed critical response. At the beginning of the 2000s, Sviličić often worked as a co-writer or script doctor on films by other directors (What Iva Recorded by Tomislav Radić, The Melon Route by Branko Schmidt).[2][3] Many of the directors with whom he worked made significantly better films than usual while co-working with Sviličić. Sviličić was therefore sometimes nicknamed "Mabuse of Croatian cinema", who "resurrects [directors] from the dead".[1][4]

Sviličić's first international success was the comedy Sorry for Kung Fu,[1] in which a young woman from the Dalmatian highlands comes back from Germany to her native village. Girl (Daria Lorenci) is pregnant, but does not reveal the identity of the father. Their old-fashioned parents try to find a husband for her, but she stubbornly refuses. The film was screened in a Forum program of Berlinale.

Sviličić's next film, Armin, was also screened in Berlin Forum. That is the story about a teenage musician and his simpleton father who travel from Bosnia to Zagreb to audition for a German coproduction film. Son is skeptical and bitter, and father is naive and overtly enthusiastic for anything that is "Western" and "European".[5]

His next internationally recognised film was These Are the Rules, premiered in the Orrizonti section at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the award for the best actor.[2]

Sviličić is continually working as a script writer, he wrote the script for "The Father" together with director Srdan Golubović (Premiere Berlinale 2020, Panorama audience award).[6][7]

He was working as a script consultant for many European script development platforms like First Film First, EAVE or Nipkow Program. At the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, he works as a screenwriting tutor.[8]

Sviličić signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.[9]

• Wish I Were a Shark (Da mi je biti morski pas) (1999) — writer and director
• Sorry for Kung Fu (Oprosti za kung fu) (2004) — writer and director
• What Iva Recorded (Što je Iva snimila 21. listopada 2003.) (2005) — writer
• The Melon Route (Put lubenica) (2006) — writer
• Armin (2007) — writer and director
• Metastases (2009) — writer
• Two Sunny Days (2010) — writer and director
• These Are the Rules (2014) — writer and director
• We Will Be the World Champions (2015) — writer
• The Voice (2019) — writer and director
• Father (2020) — writer

• Ognjen Sviličić at IMDb
• Ognjen Sviličić at film.hr (in Croatian)
• Ognjen Sviličić at hrfilm.hr (in Croatian)