Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1903 and dying in Moscow in 1973, Mikhail Kalatozov was a cameraman, editor and director who made his first film in the silent era, the ethnographic Salt for Svanetia (1930). After the Second World War he made The Cranes Are Flying (1957), a story of a woman waiting for her fiancé who has gone to war, with the cameraman Sergei Urusevsky's virtuoso moving shots. It won the Palme d'Or. I Am Cuba (1964), a Soviet-Cuban co-production, was forgotten for thirty years before Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola championed it.
Filmography
- Salt for Svanetia (1930)
- Valery Chkalov (1941)
- The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
- The Letter That Was Never Sent (1959)
- I Am Cuba (1964)
- The Red Tent (1969)