Sitora Alieva

Born in Dushanbe to a multicultural family Sitora began her career in the film industry as an actress. At the age of 6 she played her first two roles in a young Tajik director Batur Arabov's works and then some more roles in various art and television film. At the same time she decided not to continue her career as an actress and entered the scriptwriting and film history department of The Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography a.k.a. VGIK (course of E. Surkov and L. Mamatova) in Moscow which she graduated in 1987. In 1987-91 she worked in Tajikistan, first as an expert of the Culture Fund and then as a senior film-editor at the "Tadjikfilm" studio. Her international festival career began when Sitora was invited to organize a Tajik film program as a part of the Moscow International Film Festival in 1991. She moved to Moscow and began to work as an editor for the Fund for Cinema Support (1991-1993) and then as Daniil Dondurey's, "Iskusstvo Kino" editor-in-chief, referent (1993-1996). At the same time in 1993 Sitora had become a film program coordinator of the International Film Festival in Sochi held by "Kinotavr" Company Group and in 1999-2005 she was a director and member of the selection committee of the International Film Festival Sochi, the International Film Festival "Faces of Love", and the International Children's Arts Festival "Kinotavrik". In 2002-2005 she was an executive director of the Open Russian Film Festival "Kinotavr" and since 2005, when all the international festivals of the "Kinotavr" brand were stopped and only ORFF was left by the new management, she is a permanent program director of it. By now Sitora Alieva is an internationally recognized film expert, who was a jury member at numerous national and international film festivals, including Berlinale, Venice and Karlovy Vary, and an official Russian delegate at the Rome International Film Festival. She is Russia's Ministry of Culture film expert, lecturer at the universities and film schools in Russia and abroad and one of the key figures in selecting and promoting Russian cinema within the country and at the international film festival scene.