About us

produced-films

What is ArbatFilm?

ArbatFilm is a film production company founded in 2008 by Oleg Timofeyev and Sabine I. Gölz. Cinematographer and sound designer Christopher Renaud joined in the fall of the same year. Ukrainian Moscow-trained filmmaker and cinematographer Dmitry Lavrinenko has been part of the ArbatFilm team since 2012.

What Kinds of Films Do We Make?

ArbatFilm specializes in ambitious documentaries on musical topics with a serious intellectual and historical dimension. Our films explore the stories of exceptional musical personalities and traditions, and we strive to convey an inside view of art and music-making. ArbatFilm’s signature style strictly avoids the explanatory narrative voice-over that so dominates the bulk of documentary filmmaking. Instead, we build our films as rich and at times playful and provocative collages of interviews, music, and images. Our work is also strongly international: our films to date have focused on Russian, Ukrainian, and German stories respectively.

What Services Can We Offer You?

ArbatFilm offers complete Film Scoring services. The Timofeyev Group, directed by internationally renowned composers and recording artists Natalia Timofeyeva and Oleg Timofeyev, will develop, compose, and record an original score for your film. To contact the Timofeyev Group about commissioning music, or about pricing, please use the contact form.

What else do we do?

Cinema as a medium brings together many media and art forms – images, music, language, rhythm, editing – to create rich textures for audiences. The filmmakers at ArbatFilm are artists, musicians, and intellectuals with international backgrounds and several careers. They are fluent in several languages and offer a wide range of skills and experiences with music, photography, literature, history, and creative thinking. And they make films that they themselves would find interesting.


Arbat Film - Oleg TimofeyevOleg Timofeyev

Oleg Timofeyev is a musician, performer and scholar, and an internationally renowned expert on both European Early Music and Russian and Eastern European musical traditions. His main performance instruments are the Renaissance Lute and the Russian 7-string guitar. Since 1999, he also has been teaching courses on Soviet film, Russian literature, the history of Ukraine, and the Russian Roma at the University of Iowa. As a visiting scholar, he has taught courses on the history of musical styles at conservatoires in Moscow and Kiev. His publications include an edition of music for Viola da Gamba and many articles on the guitar in Russia, including entries in standard musical reference works. One of the most prolific Russian guitarists living outside of Russia, he has released over a dozen CD recordings on international labels (Germany, Canada, Hong Kong, Holland, and the US) to highly appreciative reviews. Timofeyev is film director at ArbatFilm and is involved in all aspects of our productions. He also brings many years of experience with sound recording and sound editing to his filmmaking with ArbatFilm.


Arbat Film - Sabine I. GölzSabine I. Gölz

Sabine I. Gölz is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. She is the author of The Split Scene of Reading: Nietzsche/ Derrida/ Kafka/ Bachmann (Humanities Press, 1998), and of numerous articles on literature and literary theory. Her work centers on the highly self-reflexive works of modern European literature, and the role of gender in disciplining readers. Her scholarly signature style often includes the analysis of both texts and images, as in her articles on Moscow Bridges (Public Culture, 2006) or on manuscripts by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin-Studien, 2008) or Franz Kafka (2011). Gölz is also a creative photographer. Her photographs have been exhibited in Moscow, Paris, and various locations in the U.S. Gölz is producer, director, camera-operator, and video-editor of ArbatFilm’s documentaries.


Arbat Film - Christopher RenaudChristopher Renaud

Christopher Renaud (University of Iowa MFA in Film & Video Production 2012) has 16 short films to his credit, some of them award-winning. He has worked on a great many more as cinematographer, lighting designer, sound recordist, and sound mixer. He is Associate Professor at University of West Georgia, where he teaches Film and Video Production.


Arbat Film - Dmitry LavrinenkoDmitry Lavrinenko

Cinematographer and Film Director, studied at the Academy for Radio and Television in Moscow in 2002. He has produced over 20 documentary and experimental films, broadcast on a number of Russian TV channels.