Although Croatia's first production house was founded in 1914 under the name of Croatia, the first feature film (Matija Gubec, A. Binički, and screenwriter M. Juric-Zagorka) was created five years later. The foundations of the Croatian film were created by Krešo Golik ("Djevojka i hrast", "Tko pjeva zlo ne misli"), Fedor Hanžeković ("Svoga tela gospodar"), Nikola Tanhofer, Veljko Bulajić and Branko Bauer. The latter group tried to modernize their physiognomy. There are also significant works by Vatroslav Mimice, Zvonimir Berković, Ante Babaja, Krste Papić and Antun Vrdoljak.
During the First World War, Croatia started to produce domestic films, but it did not last long. Films from hostile countries at the time (France, Italy and the United States, and therefore the world's foremost producers) have disappeared due to war conflicts with the repertoire, which has given way to production from Germany and in various countries of the Dual Monarchy. However, there was no real industrial and financial background in Croatia for its own film production, as there were only about 30 cinemas throughout the country. This, however, did not prevent a group of film-obsessed theater people from forming the first Croatian film company in Croatia to produce amusing movies in the middle of the war. Unfortunately, none of these productions have been preserved, so we can only judge the first Croatian film ”Brcko u Zagrebu” (1917) by rare newspaper writings and emphatic advertising announcements. It was an adapted light comedy that was shown in the theater a few years ago, and they played the most popular theater actors. The next movie ”Matija Gubec” (1917) was an adaptation of the popular historical novel about the peasant rebellion of the 16th century romantic writer August Šenoa.
Immediately after the unification in 1919, a new film factory Jugoslavija film was set up, which brought together mostly the same people as in the former Croatia. A few movies were featured, and four to five amusement films were filmed on the already tried recipe.
