Karen Shakhnazarov’s “Ward N6” gained 2 Crystal Simorgh awards at 28th international film festival in Tehran, having won in Best foreign film and Best actor nominations. The Best Actor award went to Vladimir Ilyin.

A total of 80 films contended for the Crystal Simorgh at Tehran’s international film festival due on January 23-February 4.

Karen Shakhnazarov was born on July 8, 1952 in the city of Krasnodar (southern Russia). As a boy, Karen liked drawing and staged plays in a school theater. In 1975 he graduated from VGIK (Moscow School for Cinematography) where he studied film directing under Igor Talankin. For two years he worked at Mosfilm Studios as a director’s assistant. He made three short films before he debuted in 1980 with his first full-length feature Kind Men (Dobryaki), a low-key comedy about an ambitious and cynical careerist.

The retro musical comedy We Are from Jazz (My iz dzhaza, 1983) marked the beginning of Shakhnazarov’s long-term collaboration with scriptwriter Aleksandr Borodyansky, who has cowritten almost all of his films. Another nostalgic musical comedy followed in 1985, A Winter Evening in Gagry (Zimnij vecher v Gagrakh, 1985), making Shakhnazarov one of the most commercially successful directors in Russia.