Biography

Darezhan Omirbayev (Kazakh: Дәрежан Өмiрбаев; born 15 March 1958; Alekseevka) is a Soviet and Kazakh film director and screenwriter. His film "Killer" (1998) won Un Certain Regard at the 51st Cannes Film Festival. In 1980 he graduated from the Faculty of Applied Mathematics of the Kazakh State University. He worked as a teacher and programmer, editor at the Kazakhfilm film studio. He studied at the directing faculty of VGIK. In 1987 he graduated from the Film studies Faculty of VGIK (workshop of A. Plakhov). Since 1988 — director of the Kazakhfilm film studio. Author of a number of articles on the theory of cinema, published in magazines: "New Film", "Blue Phantom" and others. In 2004-2006, he was the editor-in-chief of Kinoman magazine. His first two features "Kairat" (also shot in black and white) and "Cardiogram", which premiered at the 52nd edition of the Venice Film Festival, winning the CICT/UNESCO Prize. "Killer", a crime story inspired by Tolstoy's "The Forged Coupon", screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Prize Un Certain Regard. "Jol", Omirbaev's subsequent film, was a return to autobiography, a poetic story of a filmmaker in the vein of 8 1/2, starring Tajik filmmaker Djamshed Usmonov. "Shuga" and "Student" were departures for Omirbaev, both based on literary works - respectively, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. "Student" competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.