Eduard Zahariev

Eduard Zahariev was born on July 1st, 1938 in Moscow, USSR. Eduard Zahariev graduated from the Budapest Film School in 1961, and made his feature film debut in 1967, with If a Train isn't Coming. One of Bulgaria's foremost filmmakers, Zahariev's films constantly brought him into conflict with the authorities, and after the fall of communism he found it equally hard to adapt to the new realities of the market economy. Eduard Zahariev died of cancer shortly after finishing the rough cut of Late Full Moon, and never got to see the finished film. «Doctors say that tobacco killed him. What they didn't know was that he had lived through World War II, sharing his parents' anxiety about Russian emigration; that he had gone to school during the Stalinist era; that he was in Budapest in 1956; that he had written courageous scripts in difficult years; that he wasn't allowed to work for years because of censorship [...] May Eduard rest in peace, and if there is an afterlife for filmmakers, may he join those he respected and loved, who also left us much too early: Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Paradjanov.» (Istvan Szabo, Budapest, February 1997).