Vladimir Kobrin

Born 1942. Died 1999. After graduating in camerawork from the VGIK in 1968, he started working in the Studio of Popular Scientific films in Moscow, where he stayed until the late 1990s. As a director, scriptwriter and fine artist, he made 35 films. His artistic success culminated with Biopotential, Selforganization Of Biological Systems and in his only feature-length film The Last Dream of Anatoli Vasilevitch. Kobrin's approach to genre was unique. He turned didactic cinema into consistent philosophical treatise about the world and the place of man in it. Despite his original approach, he was welcomed neither in Soviet nor Russian cinema representatives. Being a charismatic director, he however achieved to unite his co-workers and students into a creative team called Kobrin Screen Studio.

Kobrin is one of the leading popular-science filmmakers in Russia. Together with his collaborators, Valerii Vasiľev and Mikhail Kamionskii, Kobrin has made a number of educational films on subjects like "the scientific and philosophical problems of bio-science," which slowly stray further and further away from being formal, merely didactic illustrations until they become interactive works that involve the spectator in the process of understanding the fundamental bases of being itself. In his films, Kobrin elaborates a special, metaphoric style that is "a fully achieved work of imaginative filmmaking, in which special effects, pixilation, and reverse or speed-up motion abound, a philosophical avant-garde film, entirely unexpected in terms of its country of origin.

http://www.emaf.de/1992/kobrin_e.html
http://www.rusfilm.pitt.edu/1999/kobrin3.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULiaSEZ4rIo