Natasha Merkulova

Natasha Merkulova Director, scriptwriter Natasha Merkulova was born September 19, 1979 in the town of Buzuluk in the Orenburg Region, USSR. In 2001 - graduated from Irkutsk State University with a degree in journalism and stared career at television. In 2003 - together with director Andrey Kaminskiy shot documentary 'THE CELL' about children of HIV-infected parents and was later awarded an Artyom Borovik prize for investigative journalism. In 2008 - presented short documentary 'Traumatism', that was later awarded the special prize of the Kinoshock film festival in Anapa, Russia. In 2010 - graduated from the Advanced Course for Scriptwriters and Film Directors in Moscow. In 2012 - presented two short films 'Substance: Jam', that was selected to the program for the Chicago Underground Film independent movie festival in Chicago, USA, and 'Substance: Milk', selected to the official program of the Women in Film festival (Vancouver, Canada), the Loikka Dance Film Festival (Helsinki, Finland) and the Dance on Camera Festival (New-York, USA). In 2013 - teamed up with scriptwriter and director Alexey Chupov for the feature film debut 'Intimate Parts', that later won the Best Debut and Best Actress awards and the diploma from the Russian Guild of Film Critics at the Kinotavr Film Festival (Sochi, Russia), in addition to the Jury Prize at Black Nights International Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia. 'Intimate Parts' was selected in the official program of several international film festivals including Karlovy Vary IFF (Czech Republic), Busan IFF (South Korea), Gothenburg IFF (Sweden), Listopad IFF (Minsk, Belarus), the Golden Apricot IFF (Yerevan, Armenia), Pacific Meridian (Vladivostok, Russia) and others.All of Natasha's later projects were created in collaboration with Alexey Chupov. In 2016 in collaboration with Aleksey Chupov directed their first TV series 'Tender Age Crisis'' for the Russian TV channel TNT. In 2017-2018 "Gogol", 8-episode cinematic series, written by Natasha Merkulova and Alexey Chupov, was theatrically released wide in Russia in 3 parts and collected the record-breaking Box Office in addition to unprecedented international sales results, including the sale to Amazon Prime Video for English-speaking territories. Simultaneously, another ambitious project written by Natasha and Alexey was produced - the space drama feature film 'Salyut 7', shot on IMAX 3D cameras. The film won the Best Feature Film and the Best Film Editing Golden Eagle awards. In 2018, the second feature film directed by Natasha and Alexey 'The Man Who Surprised Everyone' was selected to the Horizons Competition of the Venice International Film Festival and won the Best Actress award. The movie was selected also to international film festivals in Busan (South Korea), Gothenburg (Sweden), Rotterdam (Netherlands), Seattle (USA) and others and won the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress Nika local awards. In 2020, the new project of the writing/directing tandem, the game-changing action thriller series 'Call Center' premiered at TNT TV channel and was digitally released at PREMIER global SVOD platform. It won The Best Script award at the Pilot film festival in Ivanovo, Russia. Selected filmography: