Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography

Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov PAR is a Russian filmmaker. His most significant works include a semi-documentary, Russian Ark , filmed in a single... unedited shot, and Faust , which was honoured with the Golden Lion, the highest prize for the best film at the Venice Film Festival. Sokurov was born in Podorvikha, Irkutsk Oblast, in Siberia, into a military officer's family. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. There he became friends with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his film Mirror. Most of Sokurov's early features were banned by Soviet authorities. During his early period, he produced numerous documentaries, including an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a reportage about Grigori Kozintsev's flat in St Petersburg. His film Mournful Unconcern was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival in 1987. Mother and Son was his first internationally-acclaimed feature film.
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Konrad Wolf was an East German film director, son of Friedrich Wolf, brother of Markus Wolf. He and his family left Germany for Moscow when the... Nazis took power in 1933, where Wolf came into intense contact with Soviet film. At age 10, he played a minor role in the film Kämpfer, filmed among the German Communist emigrants in Moscow. He and his brother attended the Karl Liebknecht School in Moscow. At age 17 he joined the Red Army and in 1945, he was among the first troops to reach Berlin. He remained in the Soviet Army until 1948. He later described these events in the 1968 film, Ich war neunzehn . Shortly after the war, Wolf returned to Moscow, where he studied at VGIK. He worked afterwards as a film director at DEFA. He was the President of the Academy of Arts of the GDR from 1965 until his death in 1982. In 1978, he was a member of the jury at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1980, his film Solo Sunny was entered into the 30th Berlin International Film Festival.
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Mikhail Vartanov . Film director, cinematographer, documentarian, essayist, photographer and artist who developed a style of documentary filmmaking... termed the “direction of undirected action.” His reputation as one of the most important cinematographers, documentarians and intellectuals of his generation was cemented by such influential documentary films as The Seasons of the Year, Parajanov: The Last Spring, and a series of essays including The Unmailed Letters. Mikhail Vartanov dedicated his life to defending and supporting his close friend, the imprisoned genius Sergei Parajanov, whose talent he recognized in 1964, after watching at Moscow’s film school VGIK the landmark motion picture Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and the test footage of the unfinished Kiev Frescoes. Mikhail Vartanov met Sergei Parajanov in 1967 in Armenia and shared his thoughts about the screenplay of the masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates .
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Aleksandr Konstantinovich Petrov is a Russian animator and animation director. Petrov was born in the village of Prechistoye and lives in... Yaroslavl. He studied art at VGIK . He was a disciple of Yuriy Norshteyn at the Advanced School for screenwriters and directors . After making his first films in Russia, in Canada he adapted the novel The Old Man and the Sea, resulting in a 20-minute animated short — the first large-format animated film ever made. Technically impressive, the film is made entirely in pastel oil paintings on glass, a technique mastered by only a handful of animators in the world. By using his fingertips instead of a paintbrush on different glass sheets positioned on multiple levels, each covered with slow-drying oil paints, he was able to add depth to his paintings. After photographing each frame painted on the glass sheets, which was four times larger than the usual A4-sized canvas, he had to slightly modify the painting for the next frame and so on.
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