Roman Balayan Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Roman Balayan
Directing
Biography
Roman Gurgenovich Balayan (Armenian: Ռոման Գուրգենի Բալայան, Russian: Рома́н Гурге́нович Балая́н; born 15 April 1941, Nerkin Horatagh, Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, Soviet Union) is a Ukrainian-Armenian film director. In 1997 Balayan was awarded the title People’s Artist of Ukraine. Balayan worked as an actor in the theater of Stepanakert (located in the Nagorno-Karabakh region) in 1959–1961. He studied directing at the Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinematography and film directing at the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema and Television University, graduating in 1969. Since 1970, he has worked at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kiev. Balayan calls himself a student of Sergei Parajanov. He was nominated and won several international prizes. He is well-known for his literary adaptations; authors whom Balayan has adapted for the screen are Anton Chekhov (Kashtanka, 1975; The Kiss, 1983, TV), Ivan Turgenev (The Lone Wolf, 1977; First Love, 1995), and Nikolai Leskov (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, 1989). His film Flights in Dreams and Reality (1982), a drama about depression and a midlife crisis, is one of his most well-known works. Oleg Yankovsky portrays a creative man in his 40s who feels alienated in society. At the time of its release, politically minded viewers perceived it as a critique of Brezhnevian “stagnation”. His 1986 film Guard Me, My Talisman was entered into the main competition at the 43rd edition of the Venice Film Festival and won the Golden Tulip at the 1987 International Istanbul Film Festival. His 1977 film Lone Wolf was entered into the 28th Berlin International Film Festival and his 2008 film Birds of Paradise was shown at the 30th Moscow International Film Festival. In 2018 he announced, that he may be shooting his next film in Ukrainian language.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Ivan Mykolaichuk. Dedication
The story of life and death of actor Ivan Mykolaychuk - the legend of Ukrainian poetic cinema. The film is stylized as Vertep Christmas mystery: the heroes are explaining themselves with the roles they play.
Ivan and Marta
Ivan Dziuba - literary critic, public figure, academician of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine - belongs to the "sixties". He fully takes care of all the miscalculations and unfulfilled promises of his generation. Reflects on why the illusions were lost and why so few dreams came true ... Let's see and listen to him with his wife Martha, a Lviv woman who was his guardian angel. Together - all life. Exactly as they are, the right is the definition - the conscience of the nation.
Yankovsky
This film is not about Oleg Yankovsky in the usual sense: not a biography of a great actor, not a review of roles. And not the sharp facts from his personal life. Although it's all in the film: a dramatic fate, unknown pages of biography. Like any great actor, he possessed a secret - he did not tell both in the movies and in life. But his main gift was not even acting. Yankovsky was talented at making people fall in love with him. I wanted to look at him again and again: that's why they loved him and still love him.
Production
Romashkin Effect
A musical comedy about the adventures of four friends who are trying to film a yogurt commercials.
Flights in Dreams and in Reality
On the eve of his fortieth anniversary Sergei Makarov looks back at his life and learns that he has achieved nothing. He was not able to be happy and to bring happiness to the closest people in his life, neither to his long-suffering wife nor young mistress nor friends nor work... It is about the men who never grew up and could not find themselves in the time of stagnation – gifted, charming, but infantile and lost, they never were able to realize themselves...
Guard Me, My Talisman
The setting for this off-beat drama of love and jealousy is the Pushkin Poetry Festival in Boldino. Liosha and his wife Tania are walking through the plush forest around Boldino when a mysterious figure pops up from behind a tree and asks the couple a question on an esoteric point of Pushkin scholarship. From that strange beginning, the man, whose name is Klimov, starts to ease himself into the couple's private space, and trouble ensues. Complementing this story is the festival itself, enactments of Pushkin's works, and emotional debates among the festival-goers over the meaning of his poetry.
The Night Is Bright
Two young teachers In a home for deaf-mute and blind children decide to see if the children they are in charge of are capable of falling in love, but their experiments have unfortunate consequences.
The Night Is Bright
Two young teachers In a home for deaf-mute and blind children decide to see if the children they are in charge of are capable of falling in love, but their experiments have unfortunate consequences.
Lone Wolf
Based on one of Turgenev's Hunter's Sketches: the Lone Wolf of the title is a forest caretaker for a flippant aristocrat. Though he lives in absolute misery in a hut deep in the woods with two small children to take care of, he's feared for his merciless stalking of the starving serfs who sneak in to cut firewood.
The First Love
Based on the story of the same name by I. Turgenev. A story about the romantic feeling of falling in love with a young man for whom everything is for the first time.
The First Love
Based on the story of the same name by I. Turgenev. A story about the romantic feeling of falling in love with a young man for whom everything is for the first time.
Two Moons, Three Suns
A prosperous and calm life in an instant explodes into a monstrous event, and nothing will ever be the same again. A terrible bleeding scar remains in the soul forever. One fine day, a young and charming archaeologist Alexei, five minutes later a doctor of science, learns that his sibling was buried alive. And the brother’s killer is alive and left unpunished. Blinded by grief, Alex decides to kill ...
Birds of Paradise
The events of the film take place in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. It is forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations, it is not safe to voice one’s opinions in front of strangers. Words of truth are spoken only in private kitchens behind the curtained windows. The KGB tap phones, survey the ‘unreliable’ and consistently step by step destroy all forms of decent. The protagonists challenge the inhumane state machine, putting on stake their very lives and proving that nothing and nobody can stop a person who is on his way to achieve a true freedom.