Trivia

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival 1994

He worked from an early age. At fourteen, he was an assistant to the Secretary at the Village Soviet. He later held jobs as a tax collector, a loader, and an engineer's assistant and continued with many other types of work.

Chinghiz Aitmatov was a Kyrgyz author who wrote mainly in Russian, but also in Kyrgyz. He is one of the best known figures in Kyrgyzstan's literature.

His obituary in The New York Times characterized him as "a Communist writer whose novels and plays before the collapse of the Soviet Union gave a voice to the people of the remote Soviet republic of Kyrgyz" and adds that he "later became a diplomat and a friend and adviser to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.".

In addition to his literary work, Chinghiz Aitmatov was from 1990 to 1993 the ambassador for the Soviet Union and then Russia to Belgium and, later, for Kyrgyzstan to the European Union, NATO, UNESCO and the Benelux countries.

He was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival, in 1961; at the 7th Moscow International Film Festival, in 1971; and in 2002 was president of the jury at the 24th Moscow International Film Festival.

Some of his stories were filmed, like The First Teacher in 1965, Jamila in 1969, and several times To Have and to Lose.

In 1946, he began studying at the Animal Husbandry Division of the Kirghiz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but later switched to literary studies at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, where he lived from 1956 to 1958. For the next eight years he worked for Pravda.

He died in Nuremberg in 2008.v Aitmatov's remains were flown to Kyrgyzstan, where there were numerous ceremonies before he was buried in the village Koy-Tash, Alamüdün District, Chüy Region, Kyrgyzstan, on the Ata-Beyit cemetery, which he had helped to found and where his father most likely is buried.