Rashid Nugmanov

Rashid Nugmanov (Russian: Рашид Мусаевич Нугманов; born March 19, 1954; Alma-Ata) is a Soviet and Kazakh film director, dissident, political activist and founder of the Kazakh New Wave cinema movement. Rashid Nugmanov was born into a Muslim Kazakh family on March 19, 1954. After graduating in 1977 from the Architectural Institute in Alma-Ata, Nugmanov enrolled at the prestigious Moscow State Film Institute (VGIK), the world's first institute of cinematography in 1984. His directorial debut, The Needle, premiered in September 1988 at the "Golden Duke" Festival in Odesa, where it won the Un Certain Regard prize. Starring popular Soviet rock musician Viktor Tsoi, it was one of the first films to break the taboo against talking about drug addiction in the Soviet Union. The film was released in the USSR in February 1989 with 1,000 prints in circulation and became a box office hit viewed by over 30 million cinemagoers. The film was also a critical success, winning First Prize at the Nuremberg Film Festival and initiating the "Kazakh New Wave". He declared, in 1990, the motto of the New Wave of Kazakh cinema: "We demand no unified philosophy nor uniform artistic views on art. We are uni