Zuko Garagić’s speculative, historical-biographical cinema, at once expressionist and archival, pursues 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 and was the recipient of many awards. Currently Zuko is a PhD Student at the University of Chicago.

Zuko is 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. 

And for short cinema, Zuko has in production and post-production three films that expand his speculative approach to the “document,” drawing on archives, recreations, and postcards from imagined futures to explore memory as a labyrinth constructed by guilt’s architects in the age of post-memory. His documentary set during World War II, which is in production, & based off of his research in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, has already drawn a lot of interest.