Marya Yaborskaya
- Director
- Writer
Born on March 17 1986, in the little village of Camaguey in Cuba, to a cuban scientist and a russian seamstress, Marya Yaborskaya grew up in a modest family. Her childhood was punctuated by the everyday hardships Cuba faced at the time. It is along with her grandfather, Orlando, that Marya nourished her imagination in order to build up her values through art. This will be defining for the rest of her career.
Following the separation of her parents in 1994, Marya left Cuba and settled in Russia along with her mother. In Moscow she experienced adolescence and enrolled in a public art school. Away from her native land she discovered Russian culture through art. At 17 she left Russia and returned to Cuba to be reunited with her family and continue with her studies in a superior school of art. She spent four years in the Vicentina de la Torre de Camaguey Art Academy and one more year the the ISA in Havana. Through performance and video art she expressed the confrontation between the Russian and the Cuban culture as well as the nostalgia for Russia and her family.
March 4th 2006: In a little film theatre in her villages she discovered the short film Love, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. This immediately changed her perception of cinema.
In 2007 she left Cuba and went to Europe looking for new forms of expression. Marya became increasingly interested in experimental cinema. In 2010 she moved to Paris and in 2011 she enrolled in the ESRA (Superior School for filmmaking) in order to acquire film directing skills. With great passion for writing and directing she directed her first shorts: Ordalie and Karucel, allowing her to take part in several film festivals: Berlinale/Mexico, Cannes Short Film Corner, Golden Egg/Iceland, Festival de Cine Pobre Cuba. That same year her installation Rose is selected by the KUMU Museum to be part of the Talinn Triennal. In 2012 Marya was selected for the Talent Lab Berlinale in Mexico where she attended master classes by Carlos Carrera, Peter Belsito, Angela Molina, Jan Troell and Mika Kaurismaki.
After meeting Jean Luc Godard in Rolle in 2014, the young artists defined the guidelines of her debut feature film and started the development of it. In parallel to writing her film, Marya paints and makes videos that have been exposed in galleries both in Europe and in the United States. In 2015 was selected to take part in the RIFF Talent Lab in Iceland where she followed a directing master class with David Cronemberg.
Currently Marya is working on her feature film Orlando, where she is in search for a mobile, intangible space that resembles memory