Faces of the festival

Alexander Rodnyansky, Russian film/television producer and media executive, is the founder of the Ukrainian TV-channel 1+1 and former CEO of the biggest independent publicly traded media conglomerate in Russia - CTC Media (Nasdaq: CTCM).

He has produced over 20 TV-series and more than 30 films including East/West (1999), A Chef in Love (1997),  The 9th Company (2005),  Heat (2006), The Inhabited Island (2009), Innocent Saturday (2011), and Elena (2011). Two of his films were nominated for Oscars in the “Best Foreign Language Film” category. In 2011 a film directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev and produced by Alexander Rodnyansky Elena received the Special Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard.

In 2009 Rodnyansky established his own company – AR Films. AR Films controls one of the biggest film licensing and distribution corporations in Central and Eastern Europe - A Company; a Russian movie production company - Non-Stop Production; a leading independent film distribution company - Cinema Without Borders (Kino Bez Granits) and one of the key Russian film festivals - Kinotavr. AR Games – a division of AR Films – owns 25% of Syncopate, one of  the biggest online game publishers in Russia and the Russian-speaking markets.

Through its US office AR Films is involved in the development and production of high-quality independent films in the US. The first American project of AR Films, Billy Bob Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield's Car, starred Robert Duval, John Hurt, Kevin Bacon, Ray Stevenson and Billy Bob Thornton. His second project – The Goats, directed by D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye, Disturbia) is currently filming in Georgia. The Goats is based on a widely popular novel by Brock Cole.