Karen Shakhnazarov
FILMOGRAPHY
1979 KIND-HEARTED ONES
1983 JAZZMEN
1985 A WINTER NIGHT IN GAGRA
1986 COURIER
1988 THE TOWN OF ZERO
1991 ASSASSIN OF THE TSAR
1993 THE DREAMS
1995 AMERICAN DAUGHTER
1998 THE DAY OF FULL MOON
2001 POISONS OR THE WORLD’S HISTORY OF POISONING
Film director, scriptwriter, and Producer, Keren Shakhnazarov received the People’s Artist Award of the Russian Federation (2002), the State Award of the Russian Federation, Lenin Komsomol Award (1986), Vasilev Brothers State Award of RSFSR (1988), and member of the European Film Academy.
In 1975 he graduated from the Film Directing Department of the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK, studio of I. Talankin).
Since 1976 he has been a film director of the Mosfilm Studios and from 1991 to present time, Shakhnazarov has served as Chairman of the “Courier” Studio of Mosfilm Cinema Concern.
Keren Shakhnazarov is a leading Russian Filmmaker with a true sense of modernity. His ability to effectively punctuate significant moments is paralleled only by his capacity to entertain— enabling his audience to empathize with a variety of characters and their respective plights.
Shakhnazarov’s films are well known to both Russian and foreign spectators—the recipients of prizes at the world’s most prestigious film festivals and forums.
|
Karen Shakhnazarov, director, screenwriter
Karen Shakhnazarov was born on July 8, 1952 in the city of Krasnodar (southern Russia). When his family moved to Moscow, his father Georgy Shakhnazarov became a top Communist party apparatchik and a close adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev. As a boy, Karen liked drawing and staged plays in a school theater. In 1975 he graduated from VGIK (Moscow School for Cinematography) where he studied film directing under Igor Talankin. For two years he worked at Mosfilm Studios as a director’s assistant. He made three short films before he debuted in 1980 with his first full-length feature Kind Men (Dobryaki), a low-key comedy about an ambitious and cynical careerist. The retro musical comedy We Are from Jazz (My iz dzhaza, 1983) marked the beginning of Shakhnazarov’s long-term collaboration with scriptwriter Aleksandr Borodyansky, who has cowritten almost all of his films. Another nostalgic musical comedy followed in 1985, A Winter Evening in Gagry (Zimnij vecher v Gagrakh, 1985), making Shakhnazarov one of the most commercially successful directors in Russia. In 1986 he shot The Messenger (Kuryer), – a light-hearted lyrical comedy about an ambitious teenager.
Gradually his style darkened, his vision became satirical and sophisticated. His new affection for surrealism is felt in Zero City (Gorod Zero, 1989), a Kafkaesque portrait of corporate madness, Soviet style. In a quasi-historic drama, Assassin of the Tsar (Tsareubiitsa, 1991) the reality of pre-Revolutionary Russian terror is refracted in the twisted mind of a psychiatric patient played by Malcolm McDowell. In the time-travel comedy Dreams (Sny, 1993) an 18th-century countess finds herself in contemporary Moscow. The melodrama American Daughter (Americanskaya doch, 1995) portrays a struggling Russian father who comes to the US to find his runaway daughter. The metaphysical charade Day of the Full Moon (Den polnoluniya, 1998) is a chain of bizarre episodes loosely connected by characters who appear and then vanish. The black comedy Poisons, Or the World History of Poisoning (Yady, ili Vsemirnaya Istoriya Otravlenii, 2001) is yet another tongue-in-cheek historical hallucination.
A Rider Named Death (Vsadnik po imeni Smert’, 2004) brings the director back to his favorite theme, the history of Russia and its political extremes, in a newly engaged realistic style.
In addition to directing films, Mr. Shakhnazarov is very active and successful as a studio administrator. For many years he has run his own production unit, Kuryer. Since being appointed president and CEO of Mosfilm Studios in 1998, he has managed to pull the studios out of a long-term crisis and revive it as an attractive production facility for movies and TV-series.
|
