Soviet-era film-maker Marlen Khutsiev dies at 93

Marlen Khutsiev has died aged 93, the Russian Union of Cinematographers said on Tuesday. He was renowned Soviet-era film-maker Marlen Khutsiev, one of the country’s most influential post-war directors. A leading representative of the Soviet New Wave, “he lived a life full of drama and joy,” spokeswoman Tatyana Nemchinskaya told AFP. Georgian-born Khutsiev was famous for cult films in the mid 1950s and 1960s that captured the mood in Soviet society during Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw. His works included “Spring on Zarechnaya Street” (1956) and “I am Twenty”, known in the West as “Ilyich’s Gate” (1965). He was born on October 4, 1925 in Georgia’s Tbilisi, then known as Tiflis, and studied at the Moscow-based Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, Russia’s best-known film school.