ANDREI NEKRASOV
Writer/director

PRIZES AND AWARDS

CANNES Film Festival UNESCO Prize 1993
SPRINGING LENIN 1993

FIPRESCI Prize, Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival 1997
For the sharp moral and social perspective and the strong, expressive visual language which characterise the film’s view of contemporary reality.
LOVE IS AS STRONG AS DEATH 1997

Channel Four’s sole nomination for the Prix Italia
A RUSSIA OF ONE’S OWN,1987

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE Kinotavr, Russian International Film Festival 1997
LOVE IS AS STRONG AS DEATH, 1997

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE Moscow Russian Film Festival 2001
"for the innovative film language".
LUBOV AND OTHER NIGHTMARES, 2001

BEST LEAD (female) AWARD Kinotavr, Russian International Film Festival 2001
LUBOV AND OTHER NIGHTMARES 2000

Nomination for Golden Aries – all Russian film critics prize
LUBOV AND OTHER NIGHTMARES, 2001

FILMOGRAPHY

FILM FESTIVALS (among others)

Cannes 1993
Sundance Film festival 2002, 2004
Berlin 2001
Sao Paolo 1997, 2001
Rotterdam 2001
Mannheim-Heidelberg 1997
Karlovy Vary 2001
Moscow IFF 2001
Trömso 1997
Göteborg 1997
Cape Town 1998
Ankara International Film Fest 2001
Raindance, London 2002
Independent Film Festival of Barcelona, 2001
Outfest Film Festival, Los Angeles 2002

QUOTES

An outstanding and moving film.
Classical Music on The Prodigal Son

... a documentary full of more suspense and drama than most Hollywood movies.
Paul Hansen, The Daily Camera on Disbelief

Admirable. The use of archive film cleverly cut to music is beautiful throughout.
Time Out on The Prodigal Son

Filmed with nerve and edited with wit, it‘s a moving piece, climaxing with the marvellous extended sequence of deep and swirling emotions ...
The independent on A Russia of one’s own

One of the most talented directors today, Nekrasov achieves with his virtuoso editing the effect of shock. The archive footage, the provocative captions a la Godar and the sound track all work in powerful concert
XXL Moscow, on Lubov and other Nightmares

The gripping film!
Pat Aufderheide, Sundance Verite, AlterNet on Disbelief

Vanessa Redgrave flew into Utah for one day to support the film - whose audiences have been responding explosively.
John Anderson, NEWSDAY on Disbelief

Disbelief is remarkable in its use of American-style investigative reporting, something that is still a rarity in a country where the fight for democracy and free speech is still a daily struggle.
Peter Howell The Toronto Star on Disbelief

One of the most impressive films of the festival - a very strong, direct movie about love, personal memories and the New Russia that leaves you dizzy after seeing it.
The Daily Tiger, on Lubov and other Nightmares

Andrei Nekrasov crafts a dense and brilliantly fractured story narrative and portrait of the city… Lubov and other nightmares is rock candy that will provide pleasure for a long time.Sharri Frilott Sundance catalogue on Lubov and other Nightmares

Lubov is a movie unlike anything this particular reviewer has ever seen before. ... the style is a wild cocktail of cyberpunk, thriller, impressionism, nihilism and post-everything. All sexy and philosophical, somehow, it works.
DB, Raindance, London on Lubov and other Nightmares

MORE QUOTES

Nekrasov’s film, brilliantly combining dramatisation and newsreel, told the stories of Pasternak and his most famous creation, Dr. Zhivago.
...it had been fashioned like a Beethoven symphony, from the sustained exploitation of a single impulse.
The sumptuous filmic and dramatic qualities were a marvellous reassurance that even in the 1990s, television’s future is far from lost”
Richard Last, The Daily Telegraph on Pasternak

...perfectly contained within its twenty three minutes, the only short I saw which seemed at home in this format...The charge that this off-the-wall dottiness brings is precisely what the British film industry needs.
Derek Malcolm, The Guardian on Springing Lenin

Like Nekrasov’s fascinating debut film Love is as Strong as Death (1996) this new film about Love could be thought tacky, with its mixture of guns and sex, its series of women in orgasm.
But give this film a chance and it transcends both the meta-framework and the emphasis on sex and violence to give pictures, scenes, characters and an intriguing sound-track which combine to achieve extraordinary poignancy.
Fiona Björling, Artmargin on Lubov and other Nightmares

To find the mirror image of one's own weakness - one's own potential for madness - in the suffering of another human being - requires moral courage.
The same is true of a refusal to be bitter about one's exile. To pursue the truth of one's own history, and that of one's nation, as Nekrasov and Solzhenitsyn have so fearlessly done, requires a courage so breathtaking as to seem superhuman. Courage is the one thing money can't buy, no matter how big your movie budget. Courage can't be taught (except indirectly perhaps,by the examples of the superhumanly courageous) but clearly it can be learned.
One can only hope more of our filmmakers will find it in them to learn courage - whatever it might require. The world certainly requires it of us, now more than ever.
Again, to quote Solzhenitsyn, "Talent is an extraordinary burden.
You need skill to bear it."
F.X. Feeney, Sundance Arts Writing fellow on Disbelief


" Oppressed and Insulted"
The movie is a kind of cinematic stream-of-consciousness, interlacing black-and-white footage that often recalls the silent films of Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein, grainy color sequences and newsreel footage into the main narrative, which is shot in sometimes breathtaking color.
Even with its formal innovations, Nekrasov's film is rooted in the tradition of Russian writers and artists as social
conscience exemplified by the work of Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoevsky
By Dean Schabner, ABC news on Lubov and other Nightmares

SHORT BIO

Andrei Nekrasov studied acting and directing at the State Institute for Theatre and Film in his native St. Petersburg, comparative literature and philosophy at the University of Paris (Master’s Degree), and film in Bristol University Film School (RFT). In 1985 he assisted Andrei Tarkovski during the filming and editing of "The Sacrifice". Nekrasov then made several internationally co-produced documentaries and TV arts programmes (notably "A Russia of one's own", "Pasternak" , "The Prodigal Son", "Children`s Stories: Chechnya" ); his first drama short
"Springing Lenin" (1993) won the UNESCO prize at Cannes Film Festival that year, and in 1997 his first feature "Love is as strong as Death" won the FIPRESCI prize in Mannheim. The director’s second feature "Lubov and other Nightmares" (2001) won recognition at a great many of festivals all over the world (including Sundance and Berlin) and confirmed his status of a rebel among Russian filmmakers.

Andrei Nekrasov is also a playright and a theatre director. His German productions (of his own plays) include: "Der Spieler" (The Gambler) in Euro Theater Central in Bonn and "Koenigsberg" in the Volksbüehne Theatre in Berlin.


press conference, Berlinale 2001