Irina Aktasheva(1931-2018)

Irina Aktasheva is a Russian, but she worked in Bulgaria as an actress, a film director and a screenwriter. She graduated of the Moscow Cinema Institute in actor's classes of Sergey Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova. She married Hristo Piskov and came to Bulgaria, when at the beginning she played as an actress in Ducho Mundrov's film "The Commander of the Detachment" (1959). Then she was an assistant director in Piskov's "Poor Men Street" (1960). In "There is no Death" (1962) she became co -director to his husband. "There is no Death" (1962) were the pinnacle of the expressionistic and symbolic language - the so-called expressive realism - as the voice of modern Bulgarian films. It was picture of the worker's environment, which had until then been idealized without reservation, aroused great criticism. Aktasheva did not return to film until 1966, when, in collaboration with his husband, Hristo Piskov, she made a tumid attempt at a nonconformist tale about young workers, "Monday Morning". This film was abandoned and his release was only in 1988. After an interruption of seven years, Piskov and Aktasheva made an autobiographical evocation of revolutionary youth in "Like a Song" (1973), bathetic in its reminder of the disillusionment that followed. "Like a Song" is a story of young love against the backdrop of historical events. Aktasheva and Piskov did also "Sunstroke" (1977), "Avalanche" (1982), and "Only You, My Heart" (1987). Piskov and Aktasheva were among the initiators of the establishing of the "Club for Support of Publicity and Reconstruction in Bulgaria" in 1988, which was one of the first opposition societies against the communist regime in Bulgaria. In 2009, they received the Award of Union of Bulgarian Filmmakers for their Lifelong Achievement in the Bulgarian film art.