Film community remembers director Daria Khlestkina

“Young and beautiful, Dasha left us today,” Artdocfest director Vitaly Mansky wrote on his Facebook page following news of the death from cancer of noted Russian documentary film and screenwriter Daria Khlestkina last Saturday at the age of 41. The director, who trained at the Moscow State Linguistic University, later translated French literature, studied photography in Italy and worked as a columnist before producing documentary and feature films.

“A genuinely sad piece of news from the Russian documentary sphere to start 2015,” film expert Giuliano Vivaldo wrote on Facebook. “The young director of the film The Last Limousine Daria Khlestkina (one of the best films shown at Art Doc Fest in 2013) has died of cancer. It is a tragic loss of a filmmaker who made one of the most extraordinary films on post-Soviet factory life in Moscow.”

Khlestkina was given the award for best feature length film at last year’s Artdocfest, the Moscow documentary film festival, for her latest work The Last Limousine. The film, described by the Hollywood Reporter as a “post-communist, post-industrial tragicomedy”, is set in a Russian car factory and focuses on the plight of the workers of the former Soviet Union’s premier car-maker ZiL.