
Andrey Zvyagintsev was born in Novosibirsk, Russia. He graduated from the acting program at the Russian University of Theater Arts, under the tutelage of Evgeny Lazarev. Zvyagintsev’s first feature film,
The Return, won the Golden Lion and Best Debut awards at the Venice Film Festival in 2003. His second film,
The Banishment, and his third film,
Elena, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and 2011, respectively.
Elena was awarded the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard competition program. Zvyagintsev’s most recent film,
Leviathan, won the award for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, and was the first Russian film since 1969 to both win a Golden Globe and be nominated for the year’s Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.