Victor Kulle

Victor Kulle began graduate studies at age 19, at Moscow's prestigeous All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), under Yuri Yegorov, and was mentored by two Russian film masters, Sergei Bondarchuk and Sergei Gerasimov. To westerners, his most recognizable Moscow accomplishment is as producer, writer, and director of the Russian version of SORRY, WRONG NUMBER, starring the great Mayya Bulgakova, and based on Lucille Fletcher's 1948 radio play. Accepted as his diploma film, Victor graduated in 4 years (norm is 5), with magna cum laude honors. Back in Prague, Victor joined Barrandov State Film Studios full-time, and worked on co-productions and production services for foreign film companies, both east and west, as director of Czech film crew. In Front v tylu vraga (1982), he directed scenes of the battle of Berlin in WWII, with a cast of 4,000 and a crew of 130. While the USSR was "helping" to run things in Czechoslovakia, Victor became a political activist and the spokesman to gain greater creative freedom for a group of young directors and producers at Barrandov. When he would not comply with the studio's Communist Party directives, he was removed as Czech film crew director on Saul Zaentz's Amadeus (1984), and sent to work as 2nd Director on a State Department of Defense "politically correct" feature, THE SKY UNDER. On returning to Prague, he found that efforts to quiet and discredit him had not abbated, so in 1982 he left Prague under the guise of a short vacation, and emigrated with his wife and daughter to Austria, where he began a two year journey to find a new country and political assylum. A year after leaving Czechoslovakia, the movement he helped start at Barrandov bore fruit, and the Youth Studio was established. A year after that, Victor and his family arrived in Los Angeles as political refugees. His first American feature, Illusions (1992), was released to the foreign market in 1993, then recut/remastered by the distributor before release to the U.S. market through Showtime and Cinemax, and then to video.