FAMOUS CROATS, Branko Lustig

Branko Lustig On 21 March 1994, the winners of the 66th Academy Awards were announced at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. When it was announced that “Schindler's List” directed by Steven Spielberg won the Oscar for best picture, three winners – the three producers of the movie – took the stage. One of them was a man who survived the Nazi death camps as a young man. His name was Branko Lustig. Branko Lustig was born in 1932 in Osijek. He became caught up in the war and the genocide of the Jewish people in the NDH when he was nine years old. As a child, he passed through the Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen death camps. His father and most of his family perished in the Holocaust. In the mid-1950s, the ambitious camp survivor entered the newly emerging film industry of SFRY. He started working as a shooting organizer and executive producer. His name appears on credits of a series of important titles of the time, from Branko Bauer's “My Son Don’t Turn Around” (1956 – Lustig's first job), through the Oscar-nominated “The Road a Year Long” (1958), to the historical spectacles “Kozara” (1962) and “Anno Domini 1573” (1975). When in the late 1960s, Jadran Film turned intensively to co-productions with Hollywood, Lustig got involved in these projects. His work on the film “Fiddler on the Roof” (1971) and, especially, on the series “Winds of War” became his ticket to Hollywood. He received an invitation to work in the American film industry, which he accepted permanently in 1988. In Hollywood, as an executive producer Lustig helped in the creation of a number of notable and popular A-movies. His work is particularly important for two of the most prominent mid-stream directors of that generation: Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott. Lustig also received two producer Oscars for his work on the movies by these two directors: In 1994 for “Schindler's List” and in February 2001 for the “Gladiator”. Lustig thus became the only person from Croatia to win the world's most prestigious film award twice. Towards the end of his life, he permanently returned to Zagreb, where he was also active as the founder of a film festival. He passed away in 2019. Jurica Pavičić, writer, columnist and film critic