Gregor Božič was born in 1984 in Nova Gorica, a Slovenian town on the border with Italy. He studied film at Slovene National Film School, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and at DFFB in Berlin. He worked as a cinematographer for director Matjaž Ivanišin (Playing Men (2017), Oroslan (2019)). His research into the fruits of the Italo-Slovene borderland inspired him to make his first feature, Stories from the Chestnut Woods (2019) which world-premiered in the Discovery section of Toronto International Film Festival.