Karen Georgievich Shakhnazarov is a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, producer, screenwriter and Kremlin propagandist. He became the director general of Mosfilm in 1998.

Mosfilm is a film studio which is among the largest and oldest in the Russian Federation and in Europe. Founded in 1924 in the USSR as a production unit of that nation's film monopoly, its output includes most of the more widely acclaimed Soviet-era films, ranging from works by Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Eisenstein, to Red Westerns, to the Akira Kurosawa co-production Dersu Uzala and War and Peace.