He later attended Moscow State University at the Mathematics and Applied Linguistics of the Philological Faculty, from which he graduated in 1971.

[10] In 2001 Pavel Lungin began shooting his new film Tycoon based on Julii Dubov's [ru] novel The Big Ration.

The picture was a drama set during the Mikhail Gorbachev years about five students who jump on the private capitalism movement.

[11] Lungin made the black comedy Poor Relatives in 2005, winner of the main prize of the Kinotavr 2005 Festival,[12] and a television miniseries based on Nikolai Gogol's works, titled The Case of "Dead Souls", which premiered on NTV in September 2005.

From 2015 he is the director of political thriller television series Homeland, a localized adaptation of Prisoners of War.

In 2019, along with his son Aleksander, Lungin won the Golden Goblet Award for Best Screenplay at the Shanghai International Film Festival.