MOVIES - June 26, 1992

Prize Screenplay: Russian writer-director Ivan Kiassashvili has received the Hartley-Merrill International Prize for Screenwriting for “Fellow Countrymen,” his screenplay about an American businessman who hires a Moscow cab driver to help him find the village where his Russian grandfather is buried. In ceremonies at the Writers Guild in Los Angeles, Kiassashvili was given a $10,000 check and a fellowship to the Sundance Institute Filmmakers’ Laboratory. Ted Hartley and Dina Merrill, chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of RKO Pictures, established the screenwriting competition after Hartley attended the Soviet-American Film Summit in Moscow in 1988.