Vadim Perelman

Vadim Perelman
Perelman at the Odessa International Film Festival in 2011
Born	8 september 1963 Kiev, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Kiev, Ukraine)
Occupation	Film director

Vadim Perelman (Russian: Вадим Перельман; born 8 September 1963) is a Canadian-American film director. Perelman made his feature film directorial debut in 2003 with House of Sand and Fog, following a successful career as a commercial director. The film, nominated for three Academy Awards, also marks his first screenplay credit. Perelman was drawn to the story, having been shaped by his own immigrant experience.

Born in Kiev, then part of the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union (now in Ukraine), Perelman was an only child who lived with his extended family in a communal flat. He is from a Jewish background. When Perelman was nine, his father was killed in a car accident. Five years later, he and his mother were granted permission to leave Kiev and lived in Vienna for two months before moving to Rome, where they lived in extreme poverty.

Remembering that period, Perelman likens himself to the kids in Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados — a street urchin "always searching for a hunk of bread or a scam to pull." He supported himself and his young mother in this fashion for a year. When a Canadian visa finally came, they left for that country where Perelman would ultimately build a new life and start his career.

Following some rather tumultuous teenage years, Perelman finally began to concentrate on his formal education. He attended the University of Alberta, majoring in physics and maths, before a sophomore-year class in film-making completely changed his focus. Moving to Toronto, he studied film at Ryerson University's School of Image Arts for two years, before launching his own Toronto-based production house, called Canned Films. After honing his skills directing and editing music videos, he decided to make the move to Los Angeles to further his career.