Zuko Garagić is an award-winning filmmaker whose work explores history, memory, displacement, and the unstable boundary between documentary and fiction. Moving between archival fragments, observational filmmaking, and carefully constructed fiction, his films investigate how we remember the past, and what happens when the evidence through which we understand history becomes incomplete, contradictory, or imagined.
Zuko Garagić’s works have screened at numerous international film festivals. His award-winning film Anatomy of a Lost Sound (2025) premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival and received its North American premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival. His film The Minusio Tapes (2026) premiered at the 79th Locarno Film Festival as part of the CHAOS/ORDER program, developed through the Locarno Spring Academy in collaboration with filmmakers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher and CISA, and co-produced by Radiotelevisione svizzera with support from the Ticino Film Commission. And his latest film Rosacroa, the Burden of the Andes (2027), currently in distribution, was made in Patagonia, Argentina, with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino serving as his creative mentor.
His current projects continue his interest in the relationship between history and invention. The Lost Diaries of Oskar Weiß, now in post-production, is a hybrid documentary-fiction film emerging from his research at the Leitmeritz and Flossenbürg concentration camps. Combining historical research, imagined archives, contemporary encounters, and reconstruction, the film examines how we attempt to understand events after the witnesses and perpetrators have disappeared, asking what it means to reconstruct an event that can no longer speak for itself. His filmmaking resists the impulse to regard history as complete, instead questioning how the narratives through which we understand the past are created, preserved, and transformed.
He graduated summa cum laude from New York University and earned his MFA from Columbia University, where he taught as both a Teaching Fellow and Adjunct Professor. As a filmmaker and educator, he brings his professional practice directly into the classroom, introducing students to both the creative and practical dimensions of filmmaking: from developing an idea and defining its visual language to producing ambitious and thought-provoking independent work and engaging with the international festival and artistic community.
At Boston College, Zuko Garagić encourages students to approach filmmaking not simply as a technical discipline, but as a form of inquiry: a way of looking closely at people, places, histories, and the world around them, while developing the confidence to discover their original cinematic voice.
