Ilya Petrovich Kopalin (Russian: Илья́ Петро́вич Копа́лин; 1900–1976) was a Soviet film director remembered for his documentaries.
His most famous footage is that of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference and that of Yuri Gagarin's space flight.
[1] He was born the son of a peasant[2] on 2 August 1900 in the village of Pavlovskaya, Zvenigorod on the outskirts of Moscow.
A chance meeting with Dziga Vertov led him instantly into an interest in the cinema.
His early films look at country life and agriculture in the newly created USSR.