His father Aleksandr Nikolayevich Kulidzhanov (originally Kulidzhanyan) was an Armenian revolutionary who served as a high-ranking Communist Party official.

In 1944 he traveled to Moscow and enrolled in the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography to study film direction under Grigori Kozintsev, but left it in just a year because of the poor living conditions and returned to Tbilisi.

[7] But his real breakthrough happened with the 1961 drama film When the Trees Were Tall that introduced such actors as Yuri Nikulin, Inna Gulaya, Lyudmila Chursina and Leonid Kuravlyov in their first serious roles.

Although it failed at the box office and left some of his colleagues unimpressed (like Andrei Tarkovsky who also dreamed of adapting the novel[9]), it was praised by critics and intelligentsia.

As the head of the Union he helped to preserve a lot of films, founded the Cinema Museum and saved the archive of Sergei Eisenstein.

He held this position for 20 years straight, up till the scandalous 5th Congress of the Soviet Filmmakers in 1986 when a group of activists (presumably encouraged by Alexander Yakovlev[11][12]) started booing the lecturers, accusing Kulidzhanov and other leading directors of «nepotism» and «political conformism» and demanding a reelection of the whole board.

Both of them symbolized a return to his earlier days of film making and were written by his wife Natalia Anatolyevna Fokina (born 1927), a professional screenwriter whom he met during the 1940s.