Bio
Renata Dzhalo is a film director, screenwriter, and actress from Saint Petersburg. She holds Russian and Guinea-Bissau citizenship.
She graduated from VGIK, where she studied in Alexei Uchitel’s experimental workshop for documentary and fiction filmmaking. Her directing work is shaped by the meeting of observation and staging: personal history, the texture of a place, and elements of genre cinema often coexist without a fixed boundary between documentary and fiction.
In 2019, Dzhalo staged “Vitya Needs to Leave”, shown at Doc Theatre 8/3 and the School of Modern Drama. The same year, her short documentary “Skype” was selected for Artdocfest’s Sreda programme.
Her documentary “Lenechka”, dedicated to composer Leonid Desyatnikov, received a jury diploma in the National Documentary Competition at Message to Man. Her first fiction feature, “On This Land”, was presented in the Bright Future programme of the International Film Festival Rotterdam and received a Jury Special Mention at Mayak Film Festival.