12 Facts About Yuliya Solntseva

Yuliya Ippolitovna Solntseva was a Soviet actress and film director.

Yuliya Solntseva is the first female winner of the Best Director Award at Cannes film festival in the 20th century and the first woman to win a directing prize at any of the major European film festivals, for the film Chronicle of Flaming Years, a war drama about Soviet resistance to Nazi occupation in 1941.

Yuliya Solntseva's mother worked as a senior cashier at the Muir and Maryliz Trading House.

Yuliya Solntseva studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, but left her studies and entered acting courses at the State Institute of Musical Drama.

Yuliya Solntseva acted as one of the directors of a documentary trilogy about the battle on the southern fronts.

Yuliya Solntseva collaborated with husband Aleksandr Dovzhenko on his later films, including Michurin, for which she was awarded a Stalin Prize.

Yuliya Solntseva completed the works titling it The Ukrainian Trilogy, which focused on Ukrainian nationalism with a blend of illusion and reality.

Yuliya Solntseva was not originally given credit for her own work as a director, instead seen as solely an assistant for Dovzhenko.

Yuliya Solntseva was able to discuss the conventions of socialist realism through the incorporation of melodramatic emphasis, as a way to bring these conventions into surreal worlds throughout the film.

Yuliya Solntseva was a jury member at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.

Yuliya Solntseva was named a People's Artist of the USSR when she turned 80.

Yuliya Solntseva is buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery next to her husband.