Zlata Filipović

Zlata Filipović
Born	(1980-12-03) 3 December 1980 Sarajevo, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFR Yugoslavia
Occupation	Diarist

Zlata Filipović (born 3 December 1980) is a Bosnian-Irish diarist. She kept a diary from 1991 to 1993 when she was a child living in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, later published as a book.

Biography

The only child of an advocate and a chemist, Filipović grew up in a middle-class family. From 1991 to 1993, she wrote in her diary, Mimmy, about the horrors of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, through which she lived.

Filipović and her family survived and escaped to Paris, in 1993 where they stayed for a year. She attended St. Andrew's College, Dublin (a senior school), going on to graduate from the University of Oxford in 2001 with a BA in human sciences, and has lived in Dublin, Ireland since October 1995, where she studied at Trinity College Dublin. Filipović has continued to write. She wrote the foreword to The Freedom Writers Diary and co-edited Stolen Voices: Young People's War Diaries, From World War I to Iraq. She appeared on the Canadian version of the talk show Tout le monde en parle on 19 November 2006. As of 2016, she lives in Dublin, Ireland, working in the field of documentary and other film production.

Works

Year	Title	Notes
1992, 1993	Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo	45 pages were published in 1992
1999	The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them	foreword by Zlata Filipović
2004	Milošević: The People's Tyrant	Preface and translation by Zlata Filipović
2006	Stolen Voices: Young People's War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq	co-edited by Zlata Filipović
2009	From the Republic of Conscience: Stories Inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights	Article 4, "Lost in Arizona" by Zlata Filipović
2010	Even in Chaos: Education in Times of Emergency	Chapter Six, "Hear Our Voices: Experiences of Conflict-Affected Children" by Zlata Filipović

Activism

In 2011, Filipović produced the short film Stand Up! for the Stand Up! campaign created by BeLonG To, an LGBTQ youth service organisation in Ireland against homophobic bullying in schools. It has been viewed over 1.6 million times on YouTube.

Filipović served on the Executive Committee of Amnesty International Ireland (2007–13) and is a founding member of NYPAW (Network of Young People Affected by War). She has spoken extensively at schools and universities around the world on issues of children in conflict. She was a member of the UNESCO Jury for the Prize for Children and Young People's Literature for Tolerance, and is a recipient of the Child of Courage Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles (1994).

Production

Short

• 2011: Stand up
• 2012: Motion Sickness
• 2013: Abacus
• 2014: Stand up for your friends
• 2016: OCD and Me
• 2016: The Wake
• 2017: James Vincent McMorrow: One Thousand Times
• 2017: Bittersweet (documentary)
• 2018: Johnny (documentary)
• 2018: Villagers - Fool
• 2019: Strong at the Broken Places

Documentary

• 2010: Blood of the Irish
• 2011: Hold on Tight
• 2012: Three Men Go to War
• 2013: Here Was Cuba
• 2014: Somebody to love
• 2016: The Farthest
• 2016: The Story of Yes

Television

• 2017: The Babymakers (series documentary)
• 2018: The Game: The Story of Hurling (series documentary)

External links

• Zlata Filipović at IMDb
• Interview with Zlata Filipovic, motherdaughterbookclub.com, February 2010; accessed 7 March 2016.
• Zlata Filipović interview on the Charlie Rose show, 7 March 1994
• Le Journal De Zlata from Zone Libre, radio-canada.ca, 19 December 2003. (in French)