Vedran Šamanović Award

In presenting the Vedran Šamanović Award awarded this year for the first time in honor of esteemed cinematographer and film author Vedran Šamanović who died before his time, the three-member award committee comprised of Diana Nenadić (film critic), Arsen Ostojić (film director) and Dean Šoša (film critic) have set themselves the demanding task of choosing a film artist in any area of filmmaking, in either short or feature film, who has made the most innovative and valuable contribution to Croatian filmmaking. The work that best embodies the inquisitive and versatile spirit recognized by the award is the cinematography of Boris Poljak, director of photography on fiction feature Blizine (‘Closeness’) by Zdravko Mustać and Poljak’s work as director and cinematographer on the 2009 short film The Split Watercolor.

‘The Split Watercolor’ is a peculiar hybrid of experimental film and observational documentary in which Poljak, by filming bathers at an unattractive and dusty Split beach using a teleobjective lens, achieves marvelous watercolor effects and multilayered visual compositions. While the human forms in the frame lounge about in the midst of crushed rocks, scorched earth and dusty cars set against the blue backdrop of the sea teeming with busy maritime life, the author arranges the scenes in a freeform collage technique to ironize the myth about the invaluable importance of enjoying the comforts of sea and sunshine.

As the director of photography on the feature film ‘Closeness’ directed by Zdravko Mustać, Poljak manages to create a sense of playfulness and openness in the otherwise very hermetic space of an elevator as the place of encounter of two people. By matching the camera movements to their emotional distances, closeness and conflicts in the film, he manages to turn physical space into a metaphysical one and a real situation into surrealist drama.

Zagreb, July 10, 2010

Diana Nenadić
Arsen Ostojić
Dean Šoša