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Pavel Kostomarov

Pavel Kostomarov

Directing

Biography

Pavel Viktorovich Kostomarov (Russian: Па́вел Ви́кторович Костома́ров; born November 22, 1975, Moscow) is a Russian cinematographer, feature, documentary and TV director. Winner of the Laurel Award (2004 and 2007), the White Elephant Award (2007), the Silver Bear Prize for Outstanding Artistic Achievements at the Berlin International Film Festival (2010), the Golden Eagle Award (2011). In 1991, Pavel graduated from the biology class at school No. 523 in Moscow. After graduating from school, he first studied to be an ichthyologist, but his love for photography led him to the VGIK camera department, which he graduated from in 2002. While still a student , he began working with director Sergei Loznitsa on documentaries: "Way Station" (2000), "Settlement" (2001), "Portrait" (2002). Soon, at one of the European film festivals, I met Antoine Cattin, a Swiss cinematographer, director and future co-author. In 2003, on the set of "Landscape" with Loznitsa, a case brought a talkative trucker Valera to the same hotel in Okulovka. It was Kattin who insisted on making a Transformer movie out of it later. The union continued with the documentaries "Peaceful Life" (2004), "Mother" (2007), which received many festival awards (in Anapa, Yekaterinburg, Moscow; in Argentina, Poland, Finland) and awards — "Laurel", "White Elephant". For ten years, Antoine Kattin and Pavel Kostomarov filmed director Alexei German during his work on the "History of the Arkanar Massacre", which resulted in the film "Playback" in 2012. In collaboration with documentary filmmaker Alexander Rastorguev in Rostov-on-Don, he made documentaries "I love you" (2010) and "I don't love you" (2012). Together with NTV presenter Alexey Pivovarov and documentarian Alexander Rastorguev, he created the Internet project "Term" in 2012. In December 2012, together with NTV host Alexey Pivovarov and Alexander Rastorguev, he launched a large-scale documentary project "Reality"[10]. Together with them and other co-authors: Antoine Kattin, Susanna Barangieva and Dmitry Kubasov, Pavel Kostomarov conducted casting and looked for potential heroes of the project. In addition to documentaries, Pavel continued to make feature films with Alexey Popogrebsky ("Simple Things", "How I spent this summer"), with Boris Khlebnikov (the short story "The Saving Tunnel" from the movie almanac "There is no hurry", "Until the Night Separates", "A Long Happy Life"). Shortly after February 24, 2022, he left Russia. He lives in Argentina.

Known For

Lake Vostok. At the Mountains of Madness

More than 100 years ago, explorers raced to discover the South Pole. Now scientists are racing to discover the secret subterranean world of rivers and lakes buried miles beneath it. In 1974, scientists made a sensational discovery: a vast lake underneath the icy desert of Antarctica, untouched for 400.000 years, Lake Vostok. In spring 2012, after 40 years of drilling, Russian scientist broke through the ice. In two different narrative strands the film tells the story of the evolution of life and climate, the story of four decades of exploration in the coldest place on Earth, and it accompanies the scientists on their final trip to the camp. The film also explores the mythologies and legends surrounding Antarctica – from H.P. Lovecraft to James Cameron: the ‘Mountains of Madness’ have lured many into their realm – not many left unscathed.

Lake Vostok. At the Mountains of Madness

2017Movie
The Term. Beginning of a Big Story
4.2

The documentary project The Term was conceived in May 2012. When the directing trio commenced mapping the Russian sociopolitical landscape, Vladimir Putin had just settled into the Kremlin for his third term. The original experimental format of “documentary bulletins,” which were published daily online, allowed for wide-ranging content; in the feature film version, however, the filmmakers focused solely on the members of various opposition groups. Nevertheless, the work’s neutral position remains and viewers have to interpret the objectively presented situations for themselves. The main characteristics of this strongly authentic movie include close contact with the protagonists, precise editing, and an effectively controlled release of information.

The Term. Beginning of a Big Story

2014Movie
A Long and Happy Life
4.8

Sascha lives in a village on the Kola Peninsular in northern Russia and dedicatedly manages what is left of an old collective farm. He gets on well with his farm workers who respect him and also tolerate his more or less clandestine love-affair with Anya, a secretary at the local government office. But then Sascha is suddenly faced with a dilemma: the district’s self-seeking administrators, none of whom could be termed squeamish, offer him a lucrative deal for the farm. In legal terms, Sascha doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on since his lease on the farm was only agreed with a handshake. The pressure mounts, and even more so when his employees convince him to stand firm. Against the backdrop of a landscape exposed to the elements, this unflinching man’s destiny takes its course.

A Long and Happy Life

2013Movie
Anton's Right Here
4.9

How is it possible to feel someone elses pain? The hero of this film is an autistic boy. His life is divided between an apartment with peeling walls on the outskirts of a large city, and a mental hospital. Anton comes into the frame when he is on the point of becoming a patient at a residential neuropsychiatric institution, a place where people with the sort of diagnosis that he has do not live long. The author, the camera, the hero. The distance between them shrinks with every passing minute, and the author has to enter the shot and become a character in the story. However, it is not a story about how one person helped another, but about how one person recognized herself in another. About how there is Another who lives in each of us and must be destroyed every day inside of us in order to survive.

Anton's Right Here

2012Movie
The Discrete Charm of Geometry

A team of mathematicians is working together on a big project. Excitement of discovery, hope and disappointment, competition and recognition are shown from an infinitely close distance. Scientists united by the idea of discretization, which, in short, means: constructing continuous objects from basic building blocks. Akin to the scientists' search for the right discretization of continuum, this film itself is composed of fragments - individual characters of different ages, temperaments and scientific approaches - which form a single continuous melody. The question of where the boundaries lie between mathematics and the lives of those who are involved in it and how much they are willing to sacrifice is as important as the search for precise scientific answers. A unique and unprecedented dive into the unknown world of mathematicians.

The Discrete Charm of Geometry

2015Movie