Russian director Nikolai Dostal dies at 77
Photo: Boris KUDRYAVOV
Nikolai Dostal was half Russian and half Persian. “He was born into the family of film director Nikolai Vladimirovich Dostal and Persian Jahantab Sarafi, a cellist from the Bahá’í community in Ashgabat.” This is a sentence from Wikipedia, and you will agree that it sounds like a line from a poem.
But his fate unfolded not in distant Iran, but in Russia. He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, and then went to the cinema. He collaborated with Georgy Danelia for a long time, worked as a second director for Leonid Gaidai, and then started directing films himself.
Among his directorial works are “The Accordion Man”, “Shura and Prosvirnyak”, “Cloud Paradise”, “The Little Giant of Big Sex”, “The Monk and the Demon”. These are all images from the 90s; then, apparently disillusioned with the domestic cinema, Dostal switched to television, filmed the series “Penal Battalion”, “Lenin’s Testament”, “Split” there.
