Today we’d like to introduce you to Mariya Gershteyn.
Mariya, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I was born in Gorky, Russia (now Nizhniy Novgorod).
My parents had lots of friends and at the kitchen table we would often hear and tell anecdotes, burnished by my father’s excellent story-telling ability, and these nights imbued in me a intense love for vivid narrative.
My beautiful mother instilled a sense of aesthetics and art from an early age. Our house was filled with books and journals of modern literature which transformed into moving images as I read them – from childhood I dreamed of making films.
After graduating from the Polytechnic University in my hometown, I worked as a physics teacher at a college. Every lesson I prepared as a mini-play, and my students enjoyed the course despite the difficult material. Concurrently, I took courses in screenwriting from Gorky TV, but had no opportunity to make films.
In 1990 I, with my family, immigrated to the USA. After my two sons grew up, I returned to my youthful passion of film and started to learn film-making at local colleges and NewTV. In 2004, I released my first film, that documented the extracurricular program my children attended over many years devoted to Russian literature. Since then I released seven more films touching the themes of Russian emigration, poetry (contemporary and classic), and literature and they have been well received by festivals and viewers. Most of my attentions are focused on immigration, because that is what I went through. I know it very well – what people felt, thought, and lived through. It is rewarding to tell these stories.
Now, I am working on a new documentary film about an avant-garde painter who emigrated from Russia to the USA. Both her personal life story and family history are fascinating with unexpected twists and parallel the history of the 20th century.
It’s an incredible opportunity to do what you want to do. My older son’s favorite writer, Franz Kafka, summed it up very well – “by believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
Has it been a smooth road?
There were several obstacles to overcome moving to the US there was obviously the issue of learning a new language. Past that, once I started my filmmaking career in Boston I had to learn computer based editing from scratch.
Contact Info:
- Website: mashastudio.com
- Email: mashafilm@gmail.com
Image Credit:
Mikhail L. Gershteyn
Boris Grinberg
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