TSPDT

Key Production Countries: Ukraine, Russia, USSR
Key Genres: Drama, Comedy, Melodrama, Crime, Romance, Dark Comedy
Key Collaborators: Natalya Buzko (Leading Character Actress), Yevgeni Golubenko (Production Designer/Screenwriter), Nina Ruslanova (Leading Actress), Gennady Karyuk (Cinematographer), Valentina Oleynik (Editor), Renata Litvinova (Leading Character Actress/Screenwriter), Zhan Daniel (Leading Character Actor), Valentin Silvestrov (Composer), Sergey Bekhterev (Leading Actor), Sergey Chetvertkov (Screenwriter), Oleg Kokhan (Producer), Vladimir Pankov (Cinematographer)

"Kira Muratova entered the film industry as a pupil of director Sergei Gerasimov… Her films feature feisty women, and examine women's role in society under communist rule and the perestroika era. They examine the harshness of everyday family life, and present the emotional turmoil of her characters by the use of experimental film techniques. Only her fine comedic sense of the absurd provides relief for her audience." - Erica Sheerin (501 Movie Directors, 2007)

"Kira Muratova, who died in 2018, has only now come to be recognised as one of eastern Europe’s greatest directors, after decades under the radar. Soviet censors saw her work as elitist in its experimentation and nihilistic in depicting society as a madhouse, and restricted it from the public. Arthouse canon tastemaker biases kept this hard-to-classify female outlier sidelined. Abrasive, asymmetrical and repetition-based, with a taste for the absurd and grotesque, Muratova’s films are no easy ride – but they are audacious, distinctive and visionary." - Carmen Gray (BFI, 2023)

"She was largely unknown outside the Soviet Union until 1987 when, with the advent of glasnost, her films were taken off the censors’ shelves and internationally recognised at film festivals. Idiosyncratic and totally independent, Muratova’s unique vision has remained uncompromised, while influential critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has described her as “the greatest living Russian filmmaker”. Neither seeking political interpretations or moralising, Muratova presents an uncensored, often nihilistic vision of everyday life complete with all its ugliness and cruelty. Breaking away from cinematic conventions, and using experimental techniques such as punctuating fragmented storylines with absurdism, nonsensical behaviour and bizarre montages, Muratova doesn’t allow her audiences to be passive viewers and often assaults them with manically repeated dialogue or sudden shifts in editing, leaving them as lost as the characters onscreen. Her films focus on strong female characters deconstructing gender roles and relations in a society in moral decay." - Melbourne Cinémathèque

"Between 1987 and 2012, during the last 25 years of her career, Muratova made 14 films. She outlived and outsmarted all those who banned her films, erased her from life; who covered their ears and closed their eyes, and screamed in anger. They were all washed away by the tidal wave of new life, and in their place came 14 remarkable films, all of which are on the must-see list for anyone who considers himself a film lover. There aren’t many artists to whom providence gave such a chance. Kira Muratova was lucky. And so were we all." - Sergei Loznitsa (Film Comment, 2018)

"Nobody made films like Kira Muratova. Uncompromising and uncategorizable, the Ukrainian iconoclast withstood decades of censorship to realize her singular vision in hypnotically beautiful, expressionistically heightened films that remain unique in their ability to evoke complex interior worlds." - The Criterion Collection

"They often say about me: that I’m a very brave and honest director. What the hell does bravery have to do with it? I just want to make films: in an interesting way, a difficult way, differently, in my own way or even in a simple way. Call it honesty if you like. But then I don’t get what dishonesty is." - Kira Muratova (Seance, 2016)