This morning, we learned that Zdravko Mustać, our long-time selector, had passed away. He left a profound mark on the Mediterranean Film Festival program with his film knowledge, taste, and, authorial sensibility. We were expecting the news because we knew he was fighting for his life, but it still deeply affected us. Even as we write this, we find it difficult to accept that we have lost one of the festival’s most iconic figures and a dear friend.

Mustać has been continuously selecting the competition program of the Mediterranean Film Festival since 2018, when he took on the role of the main program selector. However, his connection with the festival in Široki Brijeg goes much further back. He first served as a selector in 2004, at the fifth edition of what was then called Film Days, and in 2009 he also served as a member of the festival jury.

Since returning to the position of selector in 2018, he has reviewed thousands of documentaries from almost all Mediterranean countries. Each year, from several hundred submitted titles, he selects the films that form the core of the MFF: the competition program for feature-length and short documentary films, as well as the “In Focus” program. Last year alone, for the 26th edition of the MFF, he preselected about fifty titles from more than 300 submissions, nineteen of which ultimately made it into the official competition. 

Zdravko Mustać was born in Zadar in 1961. He studied law and became involved in film at Kinoklub Split, as a member of the fourth generation of the famous Split school of alternative film. He directed more than forty experimental and short films, videos, television documentaries, music videos, and feature films. His works have been screened at festivals and retrospectives in Croatia and abroad. He is a three-time Croatian Film Critics Association's Octavian Award, in 1996, 1999, and 2001.

 

His numerous films include "Zovem se film", "Šir Haširim", "Ekranizacija telefonskog imenika", "Gdje je Magdalena Kazimirovič", "Zadar nije za dar", "Rat je", "Product of Body", "Deborah", ''Buket'', "Amen", "Ludar", "Nigredo", "Rat za Harmagedon", "Sjeti se Sali", "Zrmanja i po (in situ)", "Morena", "Sinaj", "Purgatorij", "Planktoni", "Boje paukova", "Bastion", "Noćas" and "Zrak". He directed his first feature film “Blizine” in 2009, and the second one, “The Wind Blows”, in 2014. The feature-length documentary ''Martinac'' from 2015, dedicated to the great avant-garde director and poet Ivan Martinac from Split holds a special place among his works. He directed the popular science series ''Food as Medicine'' for HRT, which consists of ten half-hour episodes. He "edited" his latest film ''Otvor'', which is currently in post-production, from his sickbed.

For the Mediterranean Film Festival, Zdravko was not just a man who would send a list of selected films once a year. He was one of the people who had been determining its film character for years. His criteria were simple, only on the surface: the film had to have a reason for existing. He was looking for an authorial stance, a different perspective, courage in form, and stories that would remain after the lights in the cinema had been turned on.

We, the festival team and film lovers in Široki Brijeg, people who were close to him and to whom he was extremely dear, will remember Zdravko for some of his endearing human habits and traits. For example, he was always dressed all in black – he wore black shoes, black pants, a black shirt, a black jacket, and even a black hat – so he was almost invisible in the dark. But, he was not a dark person. On the contrary, he was very cheerful. And he loved going to the Veseljak restaurant because, although he was a Dalmatian, he appreciated Herzegovinian lamb more than anything else, so we would often end up there at the entrance to Široki Brijeg, timing it for when the lamb was taken off the spit. We will remember him most for his infectious laugh that rang through the city like a bell. No one knew how to laugh at a joke like that, even at his own expense, but he knew how to respond to such a joke with an even better one.

Last year, he told us about a difficult family situation, a loved one who was seriously ill. No one could have guessed then, not even he himself, how different that conversation would sound to us a year later. Life, quite unexpectedly, wrote his final scene.

Goodbye, Zdravko, and thank you for all the films you brought to audiences in Široki Brijeg.