Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrei Petrovich Zvyagintsev is a Russian film director and screenwriter. He is a laureate of the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals. He is a Golden Globe Award winner and a two-time nominee for the Academy Award in the category of Best Foreign Language Film for the films Leviathan (2014) and Loveless (2017).

Andrei Petrovich Zvyagintsev was born on 6 February 1964 in Novosibirsk. His mother, Galina Aleksandrovna, worked as a literature and Russian language teacher at a school. In 2000 she moved to Moscow from Novosibirsk. Andrei spent the first two months of his life in the village of Novomikhaylovka, where his mother was doing her practical training. His parents divorced when Andrei was five years old. In 1984, Andrei Zvyagintsev graduated from the acting department of the Novosibirsk Theatre School (Lev Belov’s workshop). He began working at the Novosibirsk Youth Theatre, but was soon called up for military service and served as an emcee in the Novosibirsk Military Ensemble. In 1986 he left Novosibirsk for Moscow to enter GITIS, where he graduated in 1990 from the acting department (Yevgeny Lazarev’s workshop). After graduating from GITIS, Andrei Zvyagintsev did not go into theatre, since, in his words, “at that time it disappointed me because it began to fawn before the audience; theatre started producing ‘product’ instead of engaging in art.” Andrei tried writing and wrote several stories, but nothing further came of it. He became seriously interested in cinema, watching retrospectives of Godard, Antonioni, Kurosawa, and Bergman at the Museum of Cinema. Until 1993 he worked as a janitor, as this made it possible to live in departmental housing near the Mayakovsky Theatre, in a former noble house, an 1825 mansion, in a room of 50 square meters. Then, until 2000, he directed commercials. He took part in stage productions (The Game of Classics (1993), A Month in the Country (1997)) and appeared in minor film roles. In 2000 he made his directorial debut. Zvy