Biography
An award-winning producer/director based in Vancouver, Canada, Zoran's films have screened in Berlin, Stockholm, London, Yangon, and Madrid, as well as Canada and the US. His 2019 feature, Friends Like These, is now streaming on Amazon Prime and won three top awards (Cinematography, Producer and Director) at The MMXXI Foreman Empire Productions International Film Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. The film features some amazing original Canadian independent music from Harlequin Gold, Jenny Banai, Daev and The Little Coyote (who were to be featured at The SXSW festival this year). In 2017, Zoran was Associate Producer on Dark Harvest, a successful independent Canadian feature film starring Cheech Marin, James Hutson, Tygh Runyan, AC Peterson and Hugh Dillon. The feature received nine top awards at a dozen international film festivals and is available on all major VOD platforms.
Zoran is a long-time member and New Media Director (since 2001) of the International Press Academy (IPA), one of the most diverse associations of entertainment journalists, and sponsor of The Satellite Awards. The IPA's annual presentation in Los Angeles honors outstanding contributions in the fields of cinema, television, and interactive media, with actors and artists from Jennifer Hudson to George Clooney to James Cameron to Dakota Fanning attending. Zoran has had the pleasure of producing and directing over half a dozen IPA award shows since its inception in 1996. The Satellite Awards have been broadcast both domestically and internationally plus nowadays streamed live online.
He brings a wealth of experience and contacts, having worked on location across Canada with some of its most respected directors (with Mina Shum on Drive She Said, Lynne Stopkewich's feature film debut Kissed and Bruce Sweeney Dirty) as well as directing and producing his own projects internationally. A truly international filmmaker, Zoran's films and videos are distributed by La Videotheque Nomade Distribution (Brussels); archived with Europeana, the European Union's virtual library for the preservation of cultural heritage, and GAMA (Gateway to Archives of Media Art) network; and are featured in TransMediale's (Berlin) permanent collection.
In 2000, Zoran launched Blitzcinema, an online platform to showcase outstanding shorts. In 2005, the first major retrospective of his short films and videos took place in Florence, Italy. In addition, his short films and videos have been exhibited in New York, Toronto, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Yangon, Madrid, Venice, Montréal and Vancouver.
Zoran has produced and directed content for clients such as ICBC (The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, a provincial crown corporation); VANOC 2010 (the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games); and UNICEF Canada, among others. He worked exclusively with Phil Helmuth, considered to be one of the great poker players of all time, a main event winner, bracelet record holder and ranked in the top 10 in poker's all-time money list.
At the moment is producing the suspense anthology series Karma, created by American writer/ filmmaker Victoria Larimore, as well as two socially conscious documentaries and a film adaptation of the soon-to-be-released book, Wild Waters by an award-winning Cree author Larry Loyie.
