Andrei Kravchuk

Kravchuk had almost completed his master's thesis in mathematics when he met filmmakers Aleksei German and Vladimir Vengerov and German found him a job as an assistant to director Yefim Gribov shooting We Are Going to America in 1992.

"[1] Between 1992 and 2001, he wrote and directed: the films Indonesiia – lubov’ moya (Indonesia, My Love), Otbleski i Teni (Reflections and Shadows), Vecher i Utro (Evening and Morning) and Rozhdestvenskaya Misteriya (The Christmas Miracle); the documentaries Deti v Strane Reform (Children in the Country of Reforms), Tamozhnya (Customs) and Marlen Shpindler; and episodes of the television series Ulitsa razbitykh fonarei (Streets of Broken Streetlights) and the television miniseries Agent Natsional’noi Bezopasnosti (Agent of National Security).

[2] When the Russian economy collapsed in 1999 and many orphaned children were forced to live on the streets, screenwriter Andrei Romanov approached Kravchuk with a newspaper article about an orphan who taught himself to read so he could find his birth mother.

[1][3] The two started collaborating in 2000 and Kravchuk, who had earlier made a short documentary about orphanages, decided to adapt the story into a film, Italianetz (The Italian).

[4][5] Kravchuk's father was a navy engineer and his mother a doctor, and he is married to a designer with two young sons.