Illia Gladstein was born in Kyiv in 1985. Started his career in film as a short film programmer at Molodist IFF. In 2013, together with Nadia Parfan, he co-founded the International festival of film and urbanism “86” which was organised in 2014-2018 in the town of Slavutych. Since 2014 he distributes independent films with 86PROKAT. In 2019 he founded an arthouse cinema in Kyiv KINO42.
In 2017 Illia founds a production company Phalanstery Films. His first produced feature
documentary “Heat Singers” premiered at Visions du Reel (Nyon, Switzerland), was awarded by National film academy (Zolota Dzyga) and Ukrainian film critics association (Kinokolo) as the best Ukrainian documentary of 2020, and was sold to the biggest Japanese broadcaster NHK.