MIKHAIL KALATOZOV

Mikhail wasn't just another eastern European cinematographer and director but a much loved Soviet and Georgian people's artiste. He directed several documentaries along with highly political films, one of which was banned by the Stalinist censor board. Mikhail was born in 1903 in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) of the Russian Empire as Mikheil Kalatozishvili, and passed away on in 1973 in Moscow. At the age of 14, he started working as a driver and three years later he decided to study Economics, which didn't last very long, since his yearning to become a filmmaker/director overcame his education.

In 1923, at the age of 20, he began his career in Georgian filmmaking. But it wasn't until two years later, when he first worked on a film set, as a writer and a cameraman where he participated in the making of such films as “The Case of Tariel Mklavadze (1925), “Gulli” (1927), “Gipsy Blood” (1928), for which he was both a co-author and a camera operator.

However, it was in 1928 when he first had a taste of directing; he co-directed “The Empire” with Nutsa Gogoberidze, which established him as a young director. Two years later he made his directorial début with “The Salt of Svanetia” an immediate worldwide success. In 1932, his film Nail in the Boot (1931) was banned by Stalinist censors for 'negativism' and he was forced to do administrative work till 1939, which in turn made him pursue a doctorate from the Art Studies Academy Saint Petersburg in 1933, a year later he was appointed director of the Tiblisi Motion-Picture Studio and remained there for four years. When Mikhail graduated in 1937, he directed two films about pilots Courage (1939) and Valeri Chkalov (1941). From 1943, he started working at Mosfilm studio and was Hollywood's ambassador of cinema from the USSR, soon after he was appointed Head of the Central Administrative Board on feature film production, later, up until 1948 he was the Deputy Minister of Cinematography of the USSR.

During the 50s' he was awarded the State Prize for his political film “The Plot of the Doomed (1951)” based on a play by Nikolay Virta, the film also went onto win an award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, along with the comedy “True Friends”. True Friends was released three years later along with two other feature length films during the decade, The Cranes Are Flying (1957), The Unsent Letter (1959). These films influenced Francis Ford Coppola in making Apocalypse Now. However, the 60s' and 70s' were a slow but fruitful period for Mikhail, as he only released I Am Cuba (1964), and The Red Tent (1971) which starred Sean Connery and Claudia Cardinale and was nominated as one of the Best English Language Foreign Film at the 1972 Golden Globes.