Branko Istvancic was born in 1967 in Subotica (Croatian minority in Serbia). He was graduated film and TV direction in 1999 at Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb (Croatia). Making his first, documentary films on 8 mm camera at 15 with his first Hungarian film teacher Zoltan Siflis from Subotica, he has continuously been involved with documentary films and has received Croatian as well as international rewards for his work - The Grand Prix at Croatian Short and Documentary Film Festival, "Oktavijan" and "Zlatna Uljanica" Golden Oil-lamp award being among them. His student short fiction Saying Goodbye / Rastanak was included in the New Direction program of The First Film Foundation in London, a selection of six outstanding films by promising European directors. Deeply enrooted in the Croatian documentary tradition, he pays special attention to the humane, but also humoristic, treatment of his subjects. His successfully film, Wellman / Bunarman (2003), continues this tradition, and elevates the simple story about a well digger to a level of the universal metaphor, but without the pretentious nature of many Croatian documentaries. The critics consider his film The Cormorant Scarecrow / Plasitelj Kormorana (1998) to be one of the best Croatian documentaries of the nineties. His debut The Ghost in the Swamp / Duh u mocvari was a domestic box-office hit and has been chosen to mark the comeback of feature-length films for children which have not been made by the Croatian film industry for the last twenty years.