Early life and career Kira Korotkova was born in 1934 in
Soroca,
Romania (present-day
Moldova) to a Russian father and a Jewish mother. Her parents were both active communists and members of the
Communist Party. Her father, , (1907–1941), participated in the
anti-fascist guerilla movement in World War II, was arrested by Romanian forces and shot after interrogation. After the war, Kira lived in
Bucharest with her mother, , was born Reznic, (1906–1981), a
gynaecologist, who then pursued a government career in
Socialist Romania. In 1959, Kira graduated from the
Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, specializing in directing. Upon graduation Korotkova received a director position with the
Odesa Film Studio in Odesa, a port city at the
Black Sea near to her native
Bessarabia. She directed her first professional film in 1961 and worked with the studio until a professional conflict made her to move to
Leningrad in 1978. There she made one film with
Lenfilm Studio, but returned to Odesa afterwards. Muratova's films came under constant criticism of the Soviet officials due to her idiosyncratic film language that did not comply with the norms of
socialist realism. Film scholar Isa Willinger has compared Muratova's cinematographic form to the Soviet Avant-garde, especially to Eisenstein's montage of attractions. Several times Muratova was banned from working as a director for a number of years each time. Kira married her fellow Odesa studio director Oleksandr Muratov in the early 1960s and co-created several films with him. The couple had a daughter, Marianna, but soon divorced and Muratov moved to Kyiv where he started work with
Dovzhenko Film Studios. Kira Muratova kept her ex-husband's surname despite her later marriage to Leningrad painter and production designer Evgeny Golubenko.
Post-Soviet period In the 1990s, an extremely productive period began for Muratova, during which she shot a feature film every two or three years, often working with the same actors and crew. Her other films released in this period include
The Sentimental Policeman (1992),
Passions (1994),
Three Stories (1997) and a short film
Letter to America (1999). Two actresses Muratova has repeatedly cast are
Renata Litvinova and
Nataliya Buzko. Muratova's films were usually productions of Ukraine or co-productions between Ukraine and Russia, always in the Russian language, although Muratova could speak
Ukrainian and did not object to the
Ukrainianization of
Ukrainian cinema. Muratova supported the
Euromaidan protesters and the following
2014 Ukrainian revolution. She was an admirer of
Sergei Parajanov and her focus on 'ornamentalism' has been likened to his and was also anti-realist, with 'repetition giving shape to all possibility', with her last film,
Eternal Homecoming effectively about cinema itself being unfinished, it is almost as if the 'spool of cinema keeps threading and tangling, threading and tangling'. In 1990, her film
Asthenic Syndrome won the Silver Bear
Jury Grand Prix at the
Berlinale. Her 2002 film ''
Chekhov's Motifs was entered into the 24th Moscow International Film Festival. Her film The Tuner'' was shown at the
Venice Film Festival in 2004. Her films received the Russian
"Nika" prize in 1991, 1995, 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2013. In 2005, a retrospective was shown at the
Lincoln Center in New York City. •
Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise •
Order of Friendship •
People's Artist of Ukraine • 1993
Shevchenko National Prize ==Filmography==