Gulshat Omarova


Gulshat Diasovna Omarova is a Kazakh film director, actress and screenwriter. She was born in Alma-Ata, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and now lives in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In 2004, Omarova was presented the Alice Award for Best Female Director by the Copenhagen International Film Festival for her film, Shiza.

Biography

Gulshat Omarova was born in Alma-Ata to a family of a journalist. Her father was the famous sports writer Dias Omarov and her mother worked in Vechernyaya Alma-Ata". Her grandmother was the director of the High Mountain Ice Skating rink and her grandfather was a high official in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.
Omaravo first starred in the movie “Sweet Juice Inside Grass,” with the instruction of director and author Sergei Bodrov. She went to Moscow's Union of Cinematographers High School and later graduated. She then enrolled in the school of Journalism at Al-Farbi University and started to work in television as an assistant administrator, a courier, and utility worker. She also worked as an advertising specialist at a Tobacco company. She went back to school and in 1998, she graduated from the State Institute of Theatre and Cinema in Almaty on specialty "documentary film and television director". Since the early 2000s, she lives with her son and other in the Netherlands. In 2004, she wrote and directed the Shiza and received an Oscar nomination for her 2007 film Mongol.

Filmography