by Hrag Vartanian
Two Russian Armenian directors are among the recent wave of directors that have reiterated Moscow's role as a highly cultured movie making center. Living in one of the birthplaces of modern film, Balayan and Shahnazarov are two influential directors with strong poetic visions that continue to build on the Russian tradition.
Born in 1941 in Nerke Oratag, Azerbaijan, Roman Gurgenovich Balayan was a theatrical actor in Armenia before becoming a director.
In 1964, he graduated from the director's department of the Yerevan Institute of Theatrical Arts, Armenia and studied at the Kiev State Institute of Theatrical Arts in the Ukraine. His first film feature film, Biryuk/Lone Wolf, was released in 1977 after a successful career in television.
Roman's fifth film, Protect Me, My Talisman won the Golden Tulip Award at the 19th International Istanbul Film Festival in 1987. He has co-written (with Marina Mareyeva) the highly acclaimed film Two Moons, Three Suns (1998) which is typical of his work as he began production with only a rough script outline. As the filming progresses the story solidifies and it is all woven together by the Balayan's intuitive process.
Based in Moscow, Balayan's other notable films include The First Love, based on a novel by nineteenth century writer Ivan Turgenev.
Writer/director/producer Karen Georgiyevich Shahnazarov was born in 1952 in Krasnodar, Russia. He studied direction at the Goskino institute, and has written many screenplays and novels.
Son of influential Gorbachev-era politician, Georgy Shahnazarov, he has served as General Director of MosFilm since 1998. His films are best described as art cinema, combining some fantastic elements with melodramatic stories that offer insight into greater issues confronting Russian society.
In his best-known film, The Assassin of the Tsar (1991), starring Malcolm McDowell, he transposes the execution of the Tsar Nicolas II into a contemporary Russia mental asylum where a schizophrenic man believes he was the man who killed the monarch.
Since he has headed the troubled production company Mosfilm, his film output has been reduced. In 2001, he released Poisons or A World History of Poisoning that relates a seemingly normal story about marital infidelity that whirls out of control as the characters meet Caligula, Nero, members of the Borgia family and ends up where you would least expect.
All his films have the weighted Russian quality typical of the great nineteenth century novels as seen through the prism of a fantastic cinematic imagination.
