I'm Aleksei Furmanov, a director based in New York. I trained as an actor in the Russian classical tradition, and I spent five years on stage before I thought about directing. I try to direct the way I wanted to be directed, and I can talk to actors in their own language. I also have an MFA in Directing from the Feirstein School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, so I know how to take a film from the first idea to the final cut.

Actors build a role out of given circumstances, and I never stopped working that way. I take an idea, sharpen the circumstances around it until they're as extreme as I can make them, and explore where that leads the characters.

I love making genre films. Dark comedy, thriller, drama. And I love irony and satire, because they let me say something serious about what actually worries me. I try to work the same way in everything else I make. Music videos, short-form work, social media content.