The Golden Arena awards were established in 1955 as the Yugoslav national film awards presented annually at the Pula Film Festival in Pula, Croatia, with the Big Golden Arena for Best Film its main prize. From 1955 to 1990 the awards were the Yugoslav cinema equivalent of the Academy Awards. In 1991 the festival was cancelled due to the breakup of Yugoslavia, but then resumed in 1992 as the Croatian film awards festival (thereby excluding films and filmmakers from present-day Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia). It has been held in this format every year since, although no prizes were awarded at the 1994 edition.
The festival's competition program usually includes screenings of all locally produced feature films made in the preceding 12 months (which is made possible due to the local film industry's relatively low output), so everyone involved in making them automatically qualifies for the Golden Arena awards. Therefore there are no Academy Award-style lists of nominees announced prior to the actual awarding ceremony. The awards are given by a jury of five or six members which is named before each festival edition by the festival's managing board, and it usually consists of prominent filmmakers and film critics.
Although the festival was established in 1954, the award for best film was first awarded in 1957 - prior to the 1957 edition, the festival had separate critics' choice and audience awards for best film screened at the festival. Until 1990, the award was always given to the film's production company or companies, except in 1981 when the award was merged with the Golden Arena for Best Director and both the director and production companies of the winning film (The Fall of Italy by Lordan Zafranović) were credited with the award. Overall, Jadran Film of Zagreb and Avala Film of Belgrade were the most successful studios in the Yugoslav period (1957–1990) winning 11 and 8 awards respectively.
In the 1990s the award was intermittently merged with the Best Director award, until 1999 when the old format was briefly re-introduced. Between 2003 and 2007 film directors were credited with the Best Film award, while still being eligible for the separate Best Director award (although on four out of five occasions in this period the same director won both awards for the same film). Since 2008 the award is given to the film's producer.
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