July Rain

Graduating from VGIK in 1952, Khutsiyev was among the first wave of filmmakers to emerge during the Soviet thaw. He remains one of Russia’s greatest living directors. After the critical and popular success of Spring on Zarechnaya Street, his next major film— eventually titled I am Twenty—underwent years of state-ordered rewrites, re-edits, and reshoots. Complicating the thaw’s liberal reputation, Khrushchev himself ordered some of the changes. While not as frank or experimental as originally intended, the completed film is still a deeply sympathetic contemporary drama. It won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. He made a number of notable films in the sixties and seventies, particularly July Rain, and also worked for Soviet television. He returned to feature filmmaking in 1992 with Infinity, which won several awards at the Berlin Film Festival, and he’s currently working on a film based on the lives of Tolstoy and Chekhov. —Seagull Films