Born in Belgrade, he was raised by his grandparents in Niš in southern Serbia,[1] following the divorce of his parents. Fourteen years later he returned to Belgrade where he worked with his stepfather at the Yugoslav Film Archive.[2]
Paskaljević belonged to a group of several Yugoslav filmmakers who studied abroad and graduated from the prestigious Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU).[3] After returning to Yugoslavia, he made some 30 documentaries and 16 feature films which were screened at many international film festivals (such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto and San Sebastian) and met with critical acclaim.[4][5] The rise of nationalism during the breakup of Yugoslavia forced him to leave his country in 1992.[6]
In 1998 he returned to Yugoslavia to make Cabaret Balkan, which won the FIPRESCI prize at the Venice Film Festival and at the European Film Awards.[7] In 2001,[8] Variety International Film Guide marked him as one of the world's top five directors of the year. The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) presented a full retrospective of his work in January 2008.[9][10]
It was BFI Southbank's (London) turn to organize in July 2010 a full retrospective of his 16 feature films, along with the publication of a monograph (in English) about his work.
He died on 25 September 2020 in Paris.[12] His unproduced screenplay Cat's Cry (Mačji krik), cowritten with Đorđe Sibinović, went into production in 2023 with Sanja Živković as director, and both of Paskaljević's sons, Vladimir and Petar, as producers.[13]
