Victor Ginzburg

Was born in 1959 in Moscow, a grandson of a famous pianist Grigory Ginzburg. At the age of 15, he emigrated to the United States with his mother. He went on to study literature at the New School of Social Research and filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Ginzburg’s student film Hurricane David, a short documentary about victims of cerebral palsy expressing themselves through art therapy, won the GrandPrize at the 1983 Mason Gross Film Festival in Syracuse, New York. Ginzburg next directed Alien Probe, a short film scored to the music of New Order’s “Blue Monday” that led to Ginzburg’s entry into the music video industry. Ginzburg followed up with several successful music videos for various artists, including Pat Benatar, Lou Reed, Belinda Carlisle and Jody Watley. His music video for Bob Pfeiffer “Maybe It’s Stupid” was nominated for Best Music Video in the 1987 New York Film and TV Festival.

Ginzburg’s first feature-length documentary The Restless Garden (1993) was filmed in Moscow in 1991 and documented the cultural and sexual revolution taking place during the fall of the Soviet Union. The film premiered at the Boston International Film Festival in 1994. The film was provocative because of its eroticism and depiction of nudity and led to Ginzburg directing. Ginzburg directed several episodes for the HBO documentary television series Real Sex.

In 2006, after a ten-year period of simultaneously running a successful music video and commercial creative boutique “Room” and developing screenplays, Ginzburg began pre-production on a Russian language film Generation P, based on the best-selling Russian novel of the same name by Victor Pelevin. In 2006, Ginzburg dedicated himself to the writing, producing and directing of “Generation P”, a film based on a best-selling novel about the rise of the advertising industry in Post-Soviet Russia by Victor Pelevin, one of Russia’s best contemporary writers. When Ginzburg secured the rights to adapt “Generation P” for the screen from Pelevin, no Russian film studio would agree to back the project. Although the movie was completed and released under the auspices of the Gorky Film Studio, Ginzburg was forced to finance the film independently, which accounts for it taking five years (2006-11) to reach theaters. A surprise hit of the spring and summer of 2011, Victor Ginzburg’s “Generation P” has proven wrong those who thought Pelevin’s 1999 cult novel was simply unfilmable. The film not only generated larger box office receipts ($4.6 million) from domestic theaters than any other Russian film that summer, it also had a successful run at numerous film festivals, including winning the Crystal Globe Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary IFF and other awards at leading international film festivals worldwide. It was also selected to the Vanguard Programme of the Toronto IFF, and New Directors/New Films at MoMA and Lincoln Center.

In 2011 Ginzburg acquired film rights to another Victor Pelevin book “Empire V”, the unofficial sequel to Generation P. Filming starts this fall.