Anatoly Anichkin

Anatoly Antonovich Anichkin was a Soviet and Uzbekistani documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and editor. He was born in Moscow in 1930, graduated from the philology faculty of Chernivtsi State University and for a time taught Russian language and literature in Moscow.

In 1956 Anichkin moved to Tashkent, hoping to change his profession and take up journalism. At the editorial office of Pravda Vostoka the journalist Georgy Dimov advised him to try documentary film, and soon he joined the Tashkent newsreel studio headed by Malik Kayumov.

From 1956 to 1970 Anichkin worked as editor, senior editor and then chief editor of the creative association of the Studio of Documentary and Popular-Science Films of Uzbekistan (Uzkinokhronika). Many of the republic’s screenwriters and directors remembered him as a mentor.

Colleagues recalled that he saw the script of a documentary above all as a dense, image-rich plan of the future film, and held that the essential task of such dramaturgy was to find the precise image that binds the facts together.

From 1970 Anichkin wrote scripts for the film bureau of the USSR Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Management and later worked as a director at the film bureau of the USSR Ministry of Light Industry. His films include “Tashkent Is Always Tashkent” (1966), “Bring Water With You” (1969), “Roads of Uzbekistan” (1969), “Eleven and One” (1970) and “Forum of Friendship and Cooperation” (1977).

From 1 March 1981 he was a member of the Union of Cinematographers of the Uzbek SSR. Besides film he wrote stories and poems; his later verse and notebooks were collected in the book “Pososhok”. By the end of the 2000s he lived in Moscow and Jerusalem.

According to the Russian Wikipedia, Anatoly Anichkin died on 8 August 2014.