Oksana Belousova

Oksana came into this world on January, 5th, 1987 to a family quite distant from a film industry. Her parents and an elder brother enjoyed simple watching films on TV or at a local cinema theatre. For some time Oksana was doing the same activity as well, but at some point was getting more engaged with the background information of this or that picture, focusing on crew and cast, trivia facts, technical aspects and many other things that could give a more thorough understanding. With the lapse of time Oksana built her own cinema taste and became a film adviser among family and friends. Films turned into a hobby, starting to find an approach to the idea of a future film career. Being by birth from a small town in the south of Russia and considering opportunities more pragmatically, Oksana followed her reason rather than her heart and enrolled in the local university to study English and German languages with prospective teaching and interpreting outcomes. Nevertheless, the film thoughts never really left her and she devoted two years of her studies to write a research paper about American movie quotations and their functioning in mass media texts. Oksana had a look at films from linguistic point of view which widened her understanding more of this form of art. While at university, Oksana took part in an exchange students' program and went for a year to New York, the USA. It was a year to remember and a year to find her own self. In the country of people pursuing their dreams and happiness, she tried to listen to her heart and when passing by the footsteps of New York Film Academy promised to pursue her film passion and see what it might turn into. It took Oksana three years to come back to those footsteps as a student. By that time she already graduated from university, moved to Moscow, worked as an English teacher and studied the basics of photography. While playing with a photo camera, she got more and more enthusiastic about images, its technical and conceptual aspects. But mostly she was still interested in seeing them actually moving. Oksana got enrolled in filmmaking course at NYFA to see how the films were actually made. Film academy experience was the most significant and decisive for Oksana so far. Oksana made three short films - The View (2012), You Don't Know Me (2012), The Simplexity (2013) - and for the first time in her life she tried on the role of a film director, writer, cinematographer, editor and even an actress. She could see each work from the inside and add more hands-on experience to the understanding of cinema. But the biggest discovery occurred when Oksana had an opportunity to work with an old Arriflex film camera. Seeing images actually moving in the lens made an indelible impression on her. That was the moment when Oksana became particularly interested in the origins of cinema and Silent Era. The interest in film history became an obsession. Oksana was self-studying the origins of photography, became fascinated by daguerreotypes, but when she approached the question of first film pioneers, she discovered something quite surprising. It turned out that the well-known film history theory written in most books was actually not the real one. The name of a true father of moving pictures was erased and forgotten leaving behind just some scraps of information, but those little scraps were enough to lead Oksana to another interesting turning point in her film career. Not only she unveiled the true history of cinema, but joined a documentary project of a British producer and film director David Wilkinson. Oksana gained a lot of information, authentic facts and materials about the mysterious story of the first filmmaker Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince. Oksana was also lucky to get connected with a French film historian Jacques Pfend who possesses priceless knowledge of this story. The participation in documentary project The First Film (2015) became for Oksana a big step in film history studies which were purely based on finding the truth and not believing every other word in the book. Back in Moscow Oksana decided to get experience in Russian film industry and got enrolled in a newborn Academy of Cinema and Theatre Arts established by a world-known film director and actor Nikita Mikhalkov. She studied the art of directing under the guidance of the other famous film directors Vladimir Khotinenko and Vladimir Fenchenko . During the studies Oksana made three short films - one of which "Dolmen" (2018), she went to shoot with her crew in the area around her hometown with its stunning landscapes. After this expedition Oksana prolonged her work with the producer and started the collaboration with his small production company focusing on feature films of upcoming filmmakers. Now Oksana is working on her debut feature film as well as two documentary projects.