DanStAndrei

During the last two decades, I covered, as a journalist  (radio, print and TV),  the Caucasus, the Balkans, Central Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also the EU institutions in Brussels.

As a documentary filmmaker, I realised the first documentary ever made about Chechnya outside of Russia (and the former USSR): ”Ghazavat – Une promesse de guerre“, 1992-1993, film broadcast on the French, Belgian, Dutch and Spanish TV. My latest film, Cabal in Kabul (Afghanistan, 2007) has just been reissued in France in a special edition.

My YouTube channel

Cabal in Kabul (Romanian subtitles)

Iubiții Domnului (Romanian subtitles)

Howling for God / Les Amoureux de Dieu (English subtitles)

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A linguist by training, I speak and write fluently the major Western European languages and I have a good working knowledge of many other languages, including Persian (Farsi), Russian, and, for the Balkans, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian.

I am also co-author of the book ”Geopolitics of the Caucasus“, published in France in 1996, in which I wrote the chapter on Islam in the North-Caucasus. I have a French DEA (Masters Degree) about the Sufi brand of Islam.

I lived in Afghanistan for three years (2002-2004), teaching journalistic techniques, especially radio.

Selected publications:

• Pantere parfumate (Perfumed panthers), Polirom 2017 (a novel set in today’s Russia and in the Caucasus)

• In punctul lui rebbe G., Polirom 2016 (a book of erotic short stories, in which I develop my main preoccupation: language itself.)

• Dacopatia și alte rătăciri românești (cultural studies), Humanitas, Bucharest, 2014. (A book of essays on Romanian identity and cultural myths, studies on the new mythologies of the Romanian collective psyche, from a linguistic point of view. )

• Miros de roșcată amară (Scent of a Bitter Readhead, short stories), Humanitas, Bucharest, 2014. (short stories)

• Lumea ca spoială și împovărare (theatre) with Luca Pițu, Opera Magna, Iași, 2012.

• Géopolitique du Caucase, Ed. La Découverte, Paris 1996. (coll.)

• Poetica Renasterii (The Poetics of the Renaissance), Bucharest, 1984. (coll.)

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Specialties: Languages, cinema, journalism, translations, theatre.

Awards for my film Cabal in Kabul:

• Best Award of the Festival of Documentary Film and Visual Anthropology, Sibiu (Romania), 2008.
• The Nanook Award of the Festival of Ethnographic Film in Paris, 2007.
• The main prize at the Russian Flahertiana Ethnografic Film Festival (Moscow and Perm), 2007.
• Prize of the public at the Nyon Film Festival (Switzerland), 2007.

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Awards for my film Howling for God:

• FIPRESCI Award: prize of the International Film Critics at the IDFA – Amsterdam, 1998
• First Prize, professional category, at the “Traces de Vies” documentary festival in Clermont-Ferrand, 1998
• First Prize of the French Ministry of Culture at the Festival of the Ethnographic Film, organized by the Musée de l’Homme, in Paris, 1999
• Festivals of Cannes 1999 and Hollywood 1999.
• Annual Prize of the French-Belgian Society of the Authors (SCAM) for my entire activity (2000)