Zuko Garagić

Zuko Garagić’s speculative, historical-biographical films--at once expressionist and archival--pursue what he calls “archives of the imagined.” Through setting “dead facts” in the present, foregrounding the mediation between past and present, he looks to question whether history is a vast repository teeming with answers, a refuse heap of discarded dreams, or a bottomless pit that swallows all specificity? He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and earned his MFA from Columbia University, where he also taught film as a Teaching Fellow and Adjunct Professor.

Zuko is also a PhD Student at the University of Chicago. Zuko is currently in development on two feature films: one a documentary about European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic to fight in the American Civil War, lured by the promise of citizenship, the second a narrative on Bosnian assimilation in the Czech Republic. He is also in post-production on his second creative hybrid short, centred on a Czech-Italian journalist and the unresolved deaths of Roma individuals in the Czech Republic in the late 90s.