Director Sergei Yutkevich Dies at 80

Sergei Yutkevich, the Soviet film maker who twice won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and whose series of films on Vladimir I. Lenin made him famous in his homeland, is dead, it was learned this week.

Soviet newspapers said he was 80 when he died April 23 in Moscow.

Yutkevich was in his teens when he became involved with the Soviet avant-garde film movement that included Sergei Eisenstein. He studied art and film directing and began in the theater as a set designer in Moscow. He was an assistant director on “The Traitor” in 1926 and then either co-director or director on a series of documentaries and adventure stories that culminated with “Skanderbeg,” a story of an Albanian folk hero, in 1954. It was done in conjunction with an Albanian production company before the split between Russia and Albania. That film won a special jury prize at Cannes and in 1956 he won Cannes best director award for “Othello,” for which he also did the scenario.