Marika Beiku

Marika Beiku was a Greek filmmaker and political activist born in 1925 on the island of Evia, Greece. Originally studying medicine, she joined the Greek resistance during World War II and later became involved with the Communist movement during the Greek Civil War. After fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1949, she studied filmmaking at Moscow’s Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), where she collaborated with fellow students Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Gordon. She is best known as the co-director and co-writer of The Killers (1956), a student adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s story and one of Tarkovsky’s earliest films. Beiku died in Athens in 2011.