The Most Famous
FILM DIRECTORS from Kazakhstan
This page contains a list of the greatest Kazakhstani Film Directors. The pantheon dataset contains 2,041 Film Directors, 1 of which were born in Kazakhstan. This makes Kazakhstan the birth place of the 82nd most number of Film Directors behind Mauritania, and North Macedonia.
Top 2
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Kazakhstani Film Directors of all time. This list of famous Kazakhstani Film Directors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity.
1. Timur Bekmambetov (b. 1961)
With an HPI of 55.79, Timur Bekmambetov is the most famous Kazakhstani Film Director. His biography has been translated into 33 different languages on wikipedia.
Timur Nuruakhitovich Bekmambetov (born 25 June 1961) is a Kazakh-Russian filmmaker and tech entrepreneur. He is best known for the fantasy epic Night Watch (2004) and the action thriller Wanted (2008), as well as for the pioneering screenlife films Unfriended (2015), Searching (2018), Profile (2018), and War of the Worlds (2025).
2. Sergey Dvortsevoy (b. 1962)
With an HPI of 44.76, Sergey Dvortsevoy is the 2nd most famous Kazakhstani Film Director. His biography has been translated into 14 different languages.
Sergey Vladimirovich Dvortsevoy (born 1962) is a Kazakh filmmaker of Russian origin. His 2008 feature film Tulpan, was Kazakhstan's 2009 Academy Awards official submission to Foreign Language Film category. Dvortsevoy worked as an aviation engineer. He also worked for nine years as a radio engineer at Aeroflot; before studying film in Moscow in the early 1990s. His films immediately garnered international acclaim, receiving prizes and recognition at festivals around the world, including the nomination of Bread Day (1998) for the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival. The following year, his work was presented at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an institution dedicated to Flaherty's adherence to the goal of seeing and depicting the human condition. Dvortsevoy's documentaries are committed to observational filmmaking. His subjects are people living in and around Russia in transition—try in their individual ways to eke out an existence. Tulpan was Dvortsevoy's first fiction film and was nominated for the 2009 Asia Pacific Screen Awards for Best Feature Film (which it won) and Best Achievement in Directing. The Findling Award was given to him for his first film Schastye.
People
Pantheon has 2 people classified as Kazakhstani film directors born between 1961 and 1962. Of these 2, 2 (100.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Kazakhstani film directors include Timur Bekmambetov, and Sergey Dvortsevoy. As of April 2024, 1 new Kazakhstani film directors have been added to Pantheon including Sergey Dvortsevoy.
