Karen Shakhnazarov’s `Ward N6′ wins 2 awards at international film
festival in Tehran

06.02.2010 17:10 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Karen Shakhnazarov’s `Ward N6′ gained 2 Crystal
Simorgh awards at 28th international film festival in Tehran, having
won in Best foreign film and Best actor nominations. The Best Actor
award went to Vladimir Ilyin.

A total of 80 films contended for the Crystal Simorgh at Tehran’s
international film festival due on January 23-February 4.

Karen Shakhnazarov was born on July 8, 1952 in the city of Krasnodar
(southern Russia). 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.