Kira Muratova, an award-winning director, screenwriter, and actress whose films were celebrated and censored in the Soviet era, has died at the age of 83.
Muratova died in Odesa, Ukraine, on June 6, her husband, Yevhen Holubenko, said. The cause of death has not been made public.
The films of Muratova, who was known for her unique directorial style, underwent heavy censorship at the hands of the Soviet government.
Many movies she shot in the 1960s and 1970s were allowed to be shown in the Soviet Union only after Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the 1980s.
Born Kira Korotkova in 1934 in the town of Soroca -- then in Romania and now in Moldova -- to a Jewish mother and an ethnic Russian father, Muratova spent almost all her professional life as a film director in Odesa.
In 1988, her film Among Grey Stones was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, and the International Women's Film Festival Creteil (France) showed the first retrospective of her works.
In 1990, Muratova's movie Asthenic Syndrome won the Jury Grand Prix at the Berlinale.
In 1994, she was awarded the Leopard of Honor for her life oeuvre at the Locarno International Film Festival (Switzerland) and in 2000, she was given the Andrzej Wajda Freedom Award.
Muratova's films received the Russian Nika prize in 1991, 1995, 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2013.
In 2005 and 2013 retrospectives of her films were shown at the Lincoln Center in New York City and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
