Belarus-born director Darya Zhuk discovered filmmaking while studying Economics at Harvard. After beginning her career at HBO as a business analyst, she went on to earn her MFA degree with honors from Columbia University, focusing on Directing.
Her debut feature film "Crystal Swan" was Belarus' first entry into the Academy Award's Best Foreign Language category in 22 years. "Crystal Swan" opened the prestigious Karlovy Vary "East of the West" competition and won many prizes such as Grand Prix in Odessa Film Festival, Almaty International Film Festival, Grand Prix at Tbilisi International Film Festival, FIPRESCI at Bratislava IFF, Youth Jury Award at Cork Film Festival and others. It had its North American Premiere at Slamdance in 2019.
She then went on to direct the second season of the Russian-language streaming sensation Soderzhanki documenting the lives and crimes of Moscow's oligarchs and their lovers. The show was subsequently acquired by Amazon Exclusives as "Russian Affairs".
Short films Darya wrote and directed have been selected to SXSW, Tarkovsky, Atlanta, Palm Springs, Oaxaca, Santa Fe Independent film festivals to name just a few. She received the Nick Louvel Breakthrough Filmmaker award, best female writer-director award from New York Women in Film and Television in 2015 and has been nominated for the best female director by Adrienne Shelly Foundation. Additionally, she is the winner of such prestigious film grants as New York State Council for the Arts, Panavision Emerging Filmmaker grant, and Interdisciplinary Council for the Art of Columbia University grants.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Darya Zhuk
EXCERPT REVIEW OF CRYSTAL SWAN
…that she seems to regard America as an unqualified land of opportunity is poignant, but with so little elbow room in her current life, one can understand the delusion; as it is, a taste of fish-out-of-water living in Belarusian backwaters might just darken her perspective a little. No community is as straightforward as it seems in Zhuk and Landauer’s irony-rich, tone-switching script: What begins as a kookily comic quest is complicated by the emergence of human tragedy, prejudice and sexual threat.
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
May you and your family know joy, acceptance and personal safety, always.