Before World War II, Pogačić studied art history at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
In the late 1940s he enrolled at the Belgrade Film School.
[1] Between 1945 and 1947 he worked as a screenwriter and director at Radio Zagreb (present-day Croatian Radio) and as a director at the Zagreb student theatre, where he directed a local production of Señora Carrar's Rifles in 1947, the first-ever work by Bertolt Brecht staged in Yugoslavia).
[2] Pogačić's filmmaking career began in 1949 with The Factory Story (Serbo-Croat: Priča o fabrici), after which he went on to become one of the most prolific Yugoslav film authors of the 1950s.
He directed several landmark films of Yugoslav cinema: The Last Day (Poslednji dan, 1951), which is considered the first Yugoslav spy film; Legends of Anika (Anikina vremena, 1954), a film based on Ivo Andrić's story, which was the first Yugoslav film distributed in the United States,[2] and Big and Small (Veliki i mali, 1956), which was the first Yugoslav feature film to win an international prize, as it won Pogačić the Best Director award at the 1957 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.