Bortko was born 7 May 1946 in Moscow. In 1969 he went to the
Karpenko-Kary State University of Theatre, Film and Television in Kyiv. In 1980, Vladimir Bortko became production leader in the
Kinostudiya Lenfilm in
Leningrad. In 1991 he made
Afghan Breakdown, a Soviet-Italian film about the
Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan with
Michele Placido in the lead, critical of the Soviet military activity. During the troubled shooting that started in
Tajikistan in 1990 one of the team members, Nikita Matrosov, was killed by Tajik ultra-nationalists following the
1990 Dushanbe riots. According to Bortko, most of their equipment was destroyed as well, the team was evacuated, and the shooting was finished in
Crimea and
Syria. After the turn of the century Vladimir Bortko realized two of the biggest projects in the history of Russian cinema for the television channel
Telekanal Rossiya. The first was an adaptation of the novel
The Idiot written by the Russian author
Fyodor Dostoevsky into a television series of 10 episodes in 2002. The series clinched all the major television prizes in Russia, and actor
Yevgeny Mironov received the award for Best Actor at the
Monte Carlo Television Festival. Three years later followed an adaptation of the novel
The Master and Margarita written by
Mikhail Bulgakov, also into a TV series of 10 episodes. The first broadcast of 19 December 2005 was preceded by months of controversy in the media. In 2009, Bortko caused another big controversy, with his film adaptation of the historical novel
Taras Bulba written by the Russian author
Nikolai Gogol. This time the criticism came from
Ukraine, because while Bortko allowed the Polish actors in the film to speak Polish, the Ukrainian
Cossacks had to express themselves in poor Russian. Bortko is a member of the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). In March 2014 he signed a letter in support of the position of the President of Russia
Vladimir Putin on
Russian annexation of Crimea. In 2022, during the
Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bortko cried live on TV as a result of the
sinking of the Russian
cruiser Moskva in the
Black Sea, saying that this was "a real
casus belli for the war against Ukraine". ==Major projects==