Author’s Night: Katarina Zrinka Matijević

Nebojsa Slijepčević was born in 1973 in Zagreb, Croatia. In 2005, he graduated in Film Directing from the Academy of Drama and Art in Zagreb. He has directed numerous creative documentaries that were widely shown and awarded multiple times at many international festivals. ZagrebDox screened many of his documentaries, following his work closely. He is a three times nominee for Prix Europa Award for his TV documentaries. His first documentary feature, the international co-production Gangster of Love, premiered at Hot Docs and it was one of the biggest box-office successes in Croatia, winning the Audience Award at 2013 ZagrebDox. His latest documentary feature Srbenka (2018) premiered at Visions du Réel and received the Buyens-Chagoll Award, followed by the Heart of Sarajevo for best documentary and the Audence Award at Sarajevo Film Festival and many more. He is also an educator, mentoring and lecturing at Restart's School of Documentary Film in Zagreb.

Katarina Zrinka Matijević graduated in 2002 from the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts with a degree in Film and TV Directing. She also earned her Philosophy and Comparative Literature degree from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. In addition to writing scripts and directing documentary and feature films, she is a docent at VERN College of Applied Sciences where she teaches Introduction to Documentary Film Directing. Zrinka first gained public attention with her award-winning student film Duel (1998). Her first professional documentary On Cows and Men (2002, co-directed by Nebojša Slijepčević) has been screened at major international festivals such as IDFA, Munich, etc. In 2003, she filmed Peščenopolis. Her documentary A Two Way Mirror (2016) received an Oktavijan Award, and has been screened at a number of prestigious documentary festivals. Her first feature film, The Trampoline, premiered in the summer of 2016. After numerous screenings at international festivals, the film is used to educate staff at clinics for paediatric and adolescent psychology and psychiatry throughout Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.