Branca Uzur Paul Byrnes

Branca Uzur has long enjoyed reading Paul Byrnes’s film reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald – in fact, she says, she always refers to them before going to a movie.

‘I noticed his little photo in the paper, always the same, and I used to wonder what he looked like beneath the shoulders,’ she says. When she met him she felt that he is someone who looks far more serious than he actually is. ‘I think he’d like people to know that he can smile and that he is funny.’

Uzur put Byrnes in ‘his own time capsule’ because, she says, if you saw him walking down the street, he probably wouldn’t look terribly approachable. ‘He’s rocketing into the sky, perhaps, with something flying behind him.’

Born in Zagreb in 1954, Uzur studied painting and ceramics in Zagreb, Belgrade and Helsinki. She migrated to Australia in 1992.