Katrin Laur (née Poola; born April 29, 1955, in Tartu, Estonia) is an author, film director, and professor who currently lives in Estonia and Germany. In 1973 in Soviet-occupied Tallinn she graduated from a school that gave an excellent command of English (Tallinn Secondary School N°7), she then had different jobs. Laur learned photography at the Tallinn Technical School N°2 and studied philosophy for one year at the Moscow State University. From 1977 to 1982 Laur studied feature film directing at the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), in the masterclass of Sergey Gerasimov, and graduated in 1982 with a diploma summa cum laude (diploma film: “Kolm tundi rongi väljumiseni” – “Three Hours before the Train leaves.”). After graduating from the film school she left the Soviet Union with her then-husband, a Colombian fellow student, and their three-year-old daughter. She applied for political asylum in Munich, Germany, which was granted to her two years later. In Munich, she again worked different jobs, studied German at the Ludwig Maximilian University, and made a couple of documentaries for the Bavarian TV: 1987 – “Revolution aus dem Salon” – “Revolution from a Salon” – about Russian female dissidents.
