Review by Ellen Slatkin from the Denver International Film Festival	Exerpt from "L'alberto Del Desidero" by Eva Fornszaric	Reference Books
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Bio > Review from Ellen Slatkin

Ellen Slatkin wrote the following for the Denver International Film Festival 1992 Catalog. Rajko Grlic was awarded “In Recognition of Outstanding Achievement In the Art of Film” at the festival.

“Directing for me is a way of living,” states Rajko Grlic. “When you begin choosing the story for your next film you’re also choosing a period of your life; a time during which you will live and deal with characters you’ve created for at least a couple of years.” That deep, intensely personal, involvement characterizes all of Grlic’s creative enterprises. Born in Zagreb, Croatia (Formerly Yugoslavia), Grlic made his first short amateur film at the age of 14, his first professional film with actors at 18, and his first award-winning feature film, If It Kills Me, at 27. He studied directing at the University of Prague’s Film School (FAMU) from 1967 to 1971. There he immersed himself in the heady atmosphere and intellectual and political ferment that surrounded the Prague spring of 1968 as a member of the student strike committee at Prague University during the Soviet occupation. After graduating as a Director of Feature Films, Grlic began a controversial television career in Zagreb and began teaching there as Professor of Film Directing at the Academy of Drama Arts. Currently he is a Guest Professor at the Tisch School for the Arts of New York University.

Rajko Grlic’s creative sensibilities walk the high tension line between the personal and the political. His compassionate, rowdy and satiric eye explores the perplexing interaction between individual aspirations and passions on the one hand, and the multitude of social realities that constrict and temper one’s choices on the other.

You can feel that tension between individual hope and the constraints of political reality in Bravo Maestro, where a gifted young composer marries into power and money and finds his talents slipping away as his fame grows. It’s there too, in The Melody Haunts My Reverie, the passionate story of a heroic revolutionary and a bourgeois ballerina who fall in love in the midst of social and class contradictions, as radical economic and political change takes place in immediate post WWII Yugoslavia. It’s in our lives, and Grlic’s poetic insight helps us to recognize it...”