Portal:Georgia (country)/Selected biography/3

Eldar Shengelaya (ელდარ შენგელაია; born 26 January 1933) is a Georgian and Soviet film director and screenwriter who directed ten films between 1957 and 1996. From 1990 to 2004, he was member of the Parliament of Georgia. He has been awarded the titles of the People's Artist of Georgia (1979) and of the Soviet Union (1988). He has been a chairman of the Film-makers' Union of Georgia since 1976.

Eldar Shengelaya was born in Tbilisi, the capital of then-Soviet Georgia into the family of the film director Nikoloz Shengelaya and actress Nato Vachnadze. His brother, Giorgi Shengelaya is also a film director. He graduated from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow in 1958 and then worked for the Mosfilm studio. In 1960, he became a director at the Tbilisi-based Gruziya-film studio. In 1969, Shengelaya gained a nationwide acclaim with the satirical tragicomedy Arachveulebrivi gamopena ("An Unusual Exhibition") socio-political allusions of which caused discontent in the official Soviet cinema establishment. Since then, Shengelaya has retained a reputation of a highly individual filmmaker.

With Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Perestroika in the 1980s, Shengelaya produced another highly acclaimed tragicomedy about inept bureaucracy Tsisperi mtebi anu daujerebeli ambavi ("Blue Mountains, or Unbelievable Story"), one of the best achievements in the Soviet "social fiction" genre. It won the All-Union Film Festival Prize in 1984 and the USSR State Prize in 1985. After a major success in the 1980s, Eldar Shengelaya distanced himself from the cinema and became involved in the Georgian independence movement, which gained a momentum in 1989.

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