Victor Ginzburg

Victor Ginzburg splits his time between Moscow and Venice, California. He moved from Moscow to New York at age 15, and has not left behind neither the spirit nor the storytelling tradition of his native land. Ginzburg's filmmaking career started at the School of Visual Arts in New York, with "Hurricane David" (an impressionistic documentary about the victims of cerebral palsy expressing themselves through art therapy). The film won the Grand Prize at the 1983 Mason Gross Film Festival in Syracuse, N.Y. Another short film "Alien Probe" scored to the music of New Order's "Blue Monday" aired on Canal Plus and USA Network and led to Ginzburg's entry into the music video world with a clip for Bob Pfeiffer "Maybe It's Stupid," which was nominated for the best music video in the 1987 New York Film and TV Festival. Music videos for Pat Benatar, Belinda Carlisle, Jodie Watley, Lou Reed, Robbie Robertson and Gorky Park soon followed, as well as many others. His music video for the group "Klymaxx" earned a Monitor Award in 1991 for "Best Editing'. With his feature-length debut documentary "The Restless Garden", Ginzburg captured the never-before seen revolutionary and sexual underground of a crumbling empire. Filmed in Moscow during the last days of the Soviet Union, "The Restless Garden" premiered at the Boston International Film Festival in 1992. It went on to receive both exalted praise and criticism as an official selection of numerous international film festivals. While writing and developing films that challenge the norm, Ginzburg honed his filmmaking skills, directing episodic television for HBO (Real Sex), a TBS film about the music of Robbie Robertson (Mach Chi) and commercials for Swatch, the Native American Fund and Coca Cola, among others. In 2006, Ginzburg dedicated himself to the writing, producing and directing of "Generation P", a film based on a best-selling novel about the rise of the advertising industry in Post-Soviet Russia by Victor Pelevin, one of Russia's best contemporary writers. When Ginzburg secured the rights to adapt "Generation P" for the screen from Pelevin, no Russian film studio would agree to back the project. Although the movie was completed and released under the auspices of the Gorky Film Studio, Ginzburg was forced to finance the film independently, which accounts for it taking five years (2006-11) to reach theaters. A surprise hit of the spring and summer of 2011, Victor Ginzburg's "Generation P" has proven wrong those who thought Pelevin's 1999 cult novel was simply unfilmable. The film not only generated larger box office receipts ($4.6 million) from domestic theaters than any other Russian film that summer, it also had a successful run at numerous film festivals, including winning the Crystal Globe Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary IFF and other awards at leading international film festivals worldwide. It was also selected to the Vanguard Programme of the Toronto IFF, and New Directors/New Films at MoMA and Lincoln Center.