Andrei Yurievich Kravchuk Russian Андрей Юрьевич Кравчук born 13 April 1962 Leningrad is a Russian television and film director and screenwriter best known for his films The Italian 2005 and Admiral 2008 Kravchuk had almost completed his masters thesis in mathematics when he met filmmakers Aleksei German and Vladimir Vengerov and German found him a job as an assistant to director Yefim Gribov shooting We Are Going to America in 1992 By the end of filming Kravchuk had decided to give up mathematics and become a filmmaker and he was admitted to the St Petersburg Institute of Cinema and Television After graduating he worked in Russian television saying Television today in Russia is the most accessible path to professional filmmaking Between 1992 and 2001 he wrote and directed the films Indonesiia lubov moya Indonesia My Love Otbleski i Teni Reflections and Shadows Vecher i Utro Evening and Morning and Rozhdestvenskaya Misteriya The Christmas Miracle the documentaries Deti v Strane Reform Children in the Country of Reforms Tamozhnya Customs and Marlen Shpindler and episodes of the television series Ulitsa razbitykh fonarei Streets of Broken Streetlights and the television miniseries Agent Natsionalnoi Bezopasnosti Agent of National Security In 2002 he directed the film Chernyi Voron Black Raven and the documentary Semyon Aranovich Poslednii Kadr Semyon Aranovich The Final Shot which was a tribute to documentary filmmaker Semyon Aranovich whom he had learnt under at the Institute of Cinema and Television When the Russian economy collapsed in 1999 and many orphaned children were forced to live on the streets screenwriter Andrei Romanov approached Kravchuk with a newspaper article about an orphan who taught himself to read so he could find his birth mother The two started collaborating in 2000 and Kravchuk who had earlier made a short documentary about orphanages decided to adapt the story into a film Italianetz The Italian