Naumov, son of cinematographer Naum Naumov-Strazh, studied with
Igor Savchenko at the
VGIK in 1947–1951 and worked as one of his assistants on the biopic
Taras Shevchenko (1951), which he completed with fellow student
Aleksandr Alov after Savchenko's sudden death. Following the success of that debut, Alov and Naumov began to make films at the
Kyiv film studio as a team under the label "Alov and Naumov". After 1983 when Alov died, Naumov directed several pictures on his own. His first independent picture was
The Choice (1987). In 1989, Naumov completed
The Law based on a script that had been prohibited more than 20 years earlier. That film and
Ten Years without Permission to Correspond (1990) deal with the country's Stalinist past. The script for the 1994 drama White Feast
, starring
Innokenty Smoktunovsky in his last role, was a collaboration between Naumov and prominent Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra. Another project with Guerra, ''Nardo's Secret
(1997/99), was troubled by never-ending financial difficulties and passed several stages before finally being released in 2001 as Clock without Hands''. Like Naumov's other films of the 1990s, it suffered severely from Russia's cinema industry crisis and was seen by few people. Naumov had been teaching at VGIK since 1980 and in 1986 he was promoted to the rank of full professor. In 2000, he began to teach at the private Natalya Nesterova University in Moscow. == Filmography ==