Ognjen Sviličić


Ognjen Sviličić is a Croatian screenwriter and film director noted for his critically acclaimed 2007 film Armin.

Career

Sviličić was born 1971 in Split, in a family of journalists. 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. Many of the directors with whom he worked made significantly better films then usual while co-working with Sviličić. Sviličić was therefore sometimes nicknamed "Mabuse of Croatian cinema", who "resurrects from the dead".
Sviličić's first international success was comedy Sorry for Kung Fu, in which young woman from the Dalmatian highlands comes back from Germany to her native village. Girl is pregnant, but does not reveal identity of the father. Their old-fashioned parents try to find husband for her, but she stubbornly refuses. Film was screened in a Forum program of Berlinale.
Sviličić's next film, Armin, was also screened in Berlin Forum. That's the story about 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".

Filmography