Zinoviy Royzman Director Date of Birth: 11.09.1941 Country: Ukraine

Biography of Zinovy Royzman

Zinovy Royzman was a Soviet and Russian film director, screenwriter, writer, playwright, and publicist. He was born on September 11, 1941, in Odessa, which was under siege by the Romanian troops allied with Nazi Germany during the early days of World War II. Just before the complete occupation of Odessa by the Romanians, Royzman and his relatives were evacuated by sea to Central Asia. During the evacuation, Royzman's mother fell ill with typhus, and he spent 9 months in an Uzbek family, where he was breastfed by an Uzbek woman. After several relocations, Zinovy Royzman settled in Tashkent, where he worked as a welder at a plastic products factory.

Royzman completed the directing department of the A. N. Ostrovsky Tashkent Theater and Art Institute (evening department, A. I. Ginzburg's workshop) in 1964. From 1963, he worked as a director and actor at the Republican Puppet Theater in Tashkent, and from 1964 he worked as a director at the Uzbekfilm studio. He directed more than ten animated films and wrote scripts for several animated films. He was also the author and director of several satirical sketches for the magazine "Nashtar".

In the early 1990s, Royzman faced harsh criticism from the new republican authorities as the creator of the film "Code of Silence" (1990), and in 1992, he decided to leave Uzbekistan. He temporarily left his job in the film industry and settled in his mother's Moscow apartment, who had gone abroad. For two years, Royzman worked as a loader at the Northern Market in Moscow and "forgot about cinema". He later worked as a dubbing director at NTV. Royzman's return to the profession was facilitated by Herman Grozhev, the chief editor of the "Screen" association, producers Vladilen Arsenyev, Janik Fayziev, Andrey Razbash, and Ivan Demidov.

After directing the multi-part TV series "Chekhov and Co" in 1998 (co-directed with Dmitry Brusnikin), which starred actors from the Moscow Art Theater, including Oleg Yefremov and Elena Mayorova in their final film roles, Royzman continued his successful career as a film director and screenwriter. He was known for directing thrilling films, including detective stories, adventures, historical dramas, and suspenseful dramas. In his later years, Royzman focused on working in television series.

Out of all the films he directed, Royzman particularly highlighted his first independent work, "House Under the Hot Sun" (1977), and the TV series "Everyone Has Their Own War" (2010), which he had been waiting to film for seven years. However, the TV series "Everyone Has Their Own War" remained shelved for a long time and was only released on Russian television channels several years after its completion. Zinovy Royzman passed away on June 6, 2022, at the age of 81. He was buried on June 9 at Vostriakovskoye Cemetery.