Nenad Puhovski

Nenad Puhovski (born 1949) is a Croatian film director and producer.

Early Years

Puhovski was born in Zagreb, Croatia (former Yugoslavia) where he attended elementary and high school. He is Jewish.^[1] Puhovski made his first amateur film when he was 16, and for the short documentary "And the evening and morning were the seventh day ..." (1965) Nenad received numerous awards at amateur film festivals.

He studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Zagreb, and graduated in film directing at the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Art. During that period, Puhovski regularly wrote about film, theatre, television and social issues for a number of weeklies, magazines and other media.

Theatre and television

From 1975 to 1979 he worked as a dramaturge at the &TD Theatre, one of the most important independent Yugoslav theaters of the period. He directed "Jenny, the Pirates Bride" (1974) and "Emigrant talks" (1975) by Bertold Brecht, "Pit, this is America, too" (1975) by Mile Rupčić, "1984" (1976) by George Orwell, "Abduction" (1977) by Željko Senečić and "Travesties " (1980) by Tom Stoppard.

Apart from being recognized as a member of the theatrical movement which challenged the Yugoslav regime, Puhovski was also acclaimed for the stylistic innovations, specially in his vision of „1984“ when he used CCTV to conjure Orwell’s dystopia.

For television, Puhovski directed over 250 productions across all TV genres: TV fiction - "Phone Booth" (1973) by Peter Brook, "Toyota Corolla 1000" (1974) by Slobodan Šembera, "The God of Play” (1975) by Goran Massot, "Boarder’s fairy tale" (1978) by Pavao Pavličić, "Fever" (1979)4 by Tomislav Sabljak, "Happy New Year" (1982), by Simone de Beauvoir, "The Rear" (1984)5 by Miroslav Feldman, and "Cloudy with rain" (1980) based on his own script.

He also directed some twenty television documentaries including "Dead Harbor" (1976), which, for the reasons of being politically “incorrect”, was banned from broadcasting for fifteen years, and the series „Television America” (1984) which had numerous re-runs.

Puhovski also directed nearly 200 television music programs of various genres, including almost all types of music - classical, pop, rock, jazz and chanson. Furthermore, he directed three international live television broadcasts - "Eurovision night of classical music" (1986), "Dubrovnik - Stuttgart" (1988) and the "Eurovision Song Contest" (1990).

Film

Puhovski directed a number of documentaries for both small and big screens, dealing mostly with social issues (Dead Harbor, Borderlines of Hunger7, Graham & I8, Pavilion 229, Lora – Testimonies, Together10 ...) but also films about the arts (In Quest of Sutej, Five film on Nives KK11, Bucan - triptych12...). While many of his films have been screened worldwide, domestically they had a kind of a dual destiny.

Films on social issues were often banned or "just" not showed (Dead Harbor was banned for more than 15 years, some films on war crimes are still waiting to be showed publicly). On the other hand, films about fine arts have been awarded the highest honors at the national and international festivals.

In 1997, Puhovski founded FACTUM, an independent documentary film production company. In the following fifteen years he produced more than 60 documentaries. The most controversial documentaries (Operation Storm, Pavilion 22, Lora - Testimonies) and some of the best ones in that period (The Boy who Rushed, I have nothing nice to say to you, Life in the Fresh Air, Straight A’s, Three, Think Pink, War Reporter, The Years of Rust) were produced by FACTUM. As a producer, Puhovski received four awards for the best production at the Croatian National Film Festival and the films themselves dozens of national and international awards.

In 2004 Puhovski founded and became the director of ZagrebDox, an annual international documentary festival in Zagreb which regularly attracts an audience of around 25,000 viewers. Apart from screening a rich variety of documentary films ZagrebDox is, through its seminars, pitching workshops and conferences, also becoming the focal point for documentary professionals from the entire region.

In 2009 Puhovski was awarded the EDN (European Documentary Network) award for his “outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. He was also decorated by the President of Croatia and Mayor of Zagreb. He is a member of the European Film Academy, and an honorary member of CILECT.

Teaching

As a teacher, tutor & lecturer, Puhovski has been engaged at Academy for Drama Arts in Zagreb for many years, now as a full professor. He is presently heading and running MA program in documentary directing & producing at that school.

In addition to that, he designed and conducted documentary workshops at the Imaginary Academy in Grožnjan, Croatia, and the International Academy of Broadcasting in Montreux, Switzerland and tutored development of documentary projects at Roma Media Creative Lab & script developing project, run by Medienhilfe & OSI and Greenhouse development program, run by The New Fund for Cinema and Television (Israel) and funded by EuroMed Audiovisual.

References

1. ^ "'Ponovno mi prijete da će me ubiti jer sam Židov'" Nacional. 27 July 2004.

External links

• Nenad Puhovski biography at Film.hr (Croatian)
• Nenad Puhovski at the Internet Movie Database
• Nenad Puhovski - filmski dokumentarist u borbi za ljudska prava (Croatian)

Persondata
Name	Puhovski, Nenad
Alternative names
Short description	Film director
Date of birth	1949
Place of birth	Zagreb
Date of death
Place of death