Persevering through difficult times, Croatia’s Olympic medallist siblings, Janica and Ivica Kostelic spent a major part of their childhood living out of vans and tents. However, they trained relentlessly under their former handball player father and coach, Ante.
Determined, the brother and sister went on to win 10 Olympic medals including four Golds between them for Croatia, making Kostelics the greatest Sporting family of their country. Throughout their journey of enduring injuries and surgeries, one man has been following them with his camera.
Believing in their abilities from the time when they started training in their early teens, Bruno Kovacevic has been filming the Kostelic family. The result was Gnothi Seauton (Know Thyself), a Croatian documentary film on the Kostelic Olympic-medallist siblings, made out of original footage captured over 23 years.
The film was recently screened, along with an adventure flick Koko and the Ghosts, at Katara Drama Theatre as part of the first Croatia Film Day organised by the Embassy of Croatia in Qatar and Katara Cultural Village Foundation.
The films attracted a large number of lovers of foreign films, besides members of Croatian community in Doha. The audience also got a chance to interact with the makers of the films. Gnothi Seauton, with its powerful story, particularly attracted more eyeballs.
“We have been planning to organise this event for some time now. We are grateful to Katara and everyone who has helped us put it together. We wanted to introduce people here to the wonderful Croatian cinema and I hope our effort has been successful,” Tomislav Bošnjak, the ambassador of Croatia to Qatar told the audience prior to the screening.
Gnothi Seauton, he said, was selected particularly for its international appeal and the inspirational storyline.
“At the young age of 8-9 years, they possessed real talent and skills which showed in the training. They came up with outstanding results in different tasks. From my experience working at a school of physical education, I knew that those were some great results for that age,” Bruno Kovacevic, the Director of Gnothi Seauton, tells Community in an interview at the side-lines of the screening. He was accompanied by the producer of the film, Kresimir Prosoli.
Kovacevic, a TV commentator and Sports journalist by profession, started following the two siblings with his camera.  
“At that moment, nobody of course knew what the future holds for them but I had a feeling they will do something big. So I started filming them when they were doing training in summer and winter camps,” says the director.
Initially he did not plan to film it for this long. When Janica won 23 first places in 23 races in a single year, Kovacevic says he knew she was going to be big. He continued filming and tapes over tapes kept racking up in the archives. In total, he says, he ended up filming for about 250 hours.
When Janica finished her career in 2006, Kovacevic says they were hoping the Ivica will go on to win a gold medal so they kept filming him and when he finally won a silver medal, his fourth, at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, they decided to go to editing.
Being TV journalist he was aware of the upgradation in technology and kept updating the footage. However, seeing the footage from 20 years ago, you can still tell that it is from that time. He says he approached the editing part chronologically as there were three different stories all running parallel at the same time.
“We have merged the documentary with some elements of feature. We have some parts filmed with some actors and the people who were around Janica and Ivica during their careers. So it was a documentary with some scenes just to give the movie more colour,” producer Kresimir Prosoli chips in.  
There are multiple factors that make this story standout, says the director.
“In Croatia, we do not get snow. So they trained in skiing in those conditions and went on to win 10 Olympic medals between them. They had no money to start with. When they started skiing, their parents were out of work,” says Kovacevic.  
“The Croatian war had just started around that time. So they had no food, no money and no sponsors. It was a very hard time for somebody who was training for sports, especially sports that was from outside Croatian borders,” he adds.
The difference between this movie compared to some other similarly-themed films is that they started filming the Kostelics from a very early age and have original footage from over 20 years.
“I have seen movies made on sport stars in other parts of the world and they had to rely on pictures and other techniques to portray their early playing days,” says the director.
Kovacevic says he was not afraid of the possibility that the two siblings may not end up winning at the Olympics — even though he had taken some money from a bank for the film, he was paying it back on a monthly basis. 
“I took a gamble. I told myself this might end up with nothing or it may go onto become something really big. I am happy that the latter turned out to be true, but even if it had not, no problems, I could say I tried,” says the director.
In Croatia, he says, he knew the film was going to do good as this was the best sporting family in the Croatian history.
“It was not only well-received in Croatia, where it was obvious it was going to perform well. We had its world premiere in Los Angeles in the United States of America. It was great and many people approached us and they told it had great potential to be made into a feature film with real actors and that is what we are now aiming for,” the producer of the film reveals.
Last week, he says, they were we were at a film festival in Houston and won a gold award for documentary movie. “This was a great success [for us] and approval that the work that we did was really amazing,” says Prosoli.
He hopes to take the movie to many more festivals and looks forward to receiving great reviews.