Several facts that may change your attitude to me cardinally.

I met some people who look (or try to look) clever, modern and open-minded but will never talk with me, never hire me, and never participate in any business with me after reading the text below. That's why I wrote all this on my website, it will allow us to avoid head-on collisions.

1. I'm of mixed origin – mainly Asian (Tatar) and Hebrew. In spite of the fact that I was born and grew up in one of Muslim provinces of Russia (in Tatarstan), there are no ties between me and Russian or Islamic cultures. I was a teenager at the time of Perestroika, USSR disintegration and expansion of the American culture. (I was born in 1978th year.) And situation in the family of my parents was such that I grew up under the strong influence of my Jewish grandmother.
   That's why I prefer to identify myself from the cultural point of view as an "American Hebrew". (Or "American Jew", I'm not sure what of these words combinations expresses my thought more precisely.)
   Certainly I was affected by the European culture too. There was a library consisting of several thousands books in the home of my parents - it gave me the possibility to plunge into the classical European literature and arts at the time I was a child. But at the current time all this European classics is only some kind of a "dead foundation" for the two "living" parts of me - "American" and "Hebrew".
   
   My cultural lifespace is marked by green color on the picture below.
   
   
   And some additional info about my ethnic roots.
   
   My grandmother was an Ashkenazi Jew, it means there was a mixing in Middle Ages either with Germans, or with Celts, or with Western Slavs. One of my Tatar grandfathers had noticeable Finno-Ugric facial features (modern Tatars are very mixed with Finno-Ugric nations). So from 10% up to 40% of my genetic ancestry is descended from Northern European nations.
   And some branches of my father family are descended (in 19th century) from Uzbekistan and Egypt.
   
   So everything is very complex as you can see. :)
2. My screenplays touch religious questions and maybe even propagandize religious values sometimes. But in fact I'm not a religious man. In my everyday life I don't think about these questions at all.
3. I'm an "artist" by nature. This fact affects nearly everything I do, and adds both pluses and minuses to my relations with other people.

Note:
My official name is still "Kamil Rafikov". I plan to remove the ending "ov" from my last name (the reasons are explained in the item [1] above, this ending appeared in the last name of my family in the period of obligatory Russification of ethnic minorities). But I still can't do it due to some circumstances. The last name "Rafik" is used in the domain name of this website and on title pages of my screenplays only.